blob: 86d3677d8753c282b8b4868cc87ed01ead5bf0cd [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000013- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
14
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000015- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
16 returning None.
17
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000018- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
19 ('\') with a specific error message.
20
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000021- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
22
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000023- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
24 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
25
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000026- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000027 an ferror() call.
28
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000029- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
30 list.sort().
31
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000032- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
33 (2+3) --> (5).
34
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000035- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
36
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000037- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
38 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000039
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000040- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
41 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
42 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
43
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044Extension Modules
45-----------------
46
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000047- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
48 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
49
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000050- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
51 file size.
52
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000053- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
54
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000055- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
56 {remove_history,replace_history}
57
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000058- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
59 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000060
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000061- stat_float_times is now True.
62
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000063- array.array objects are now picklable.
64
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000065- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
66 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
67
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000068- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
69 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
70 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
71
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000072- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
73 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000074
75Library
76-------
77
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +000078- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
79
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000080- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
81 to build.
82
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +000083- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
84 symbolic links on Windows.
85
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000086- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
87 profile.py if available.
88
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000089- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
90
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000091- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
92 in LWPCookieJar.
93
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000094- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
95
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000096- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
97
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000098- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
99
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000100- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
101
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000102- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
103
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000104- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
105
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000106- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
107
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000108- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
109
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000110- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
111 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
112 be exploited in various ways.
113
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000114- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
115
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000116- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
117
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000118- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
119
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000120- Enhancements to the csv module:
121
122 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
123 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
124 PEP 305.
125 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
126 reporting.
127 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
128 dictates.
129 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000130 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000131 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000132 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
133 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000134 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
135 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000136 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000137 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
138 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
139 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
140 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
141 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
142 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
143 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
144 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
145 without first creating a dialect class.
146 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
147 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
148 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000149 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000150 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
151 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000152 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
153 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
154 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
155 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000156 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
157 This has been fixed.
158
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000159- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
160 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
161 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
162 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
163
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000164- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
165
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000166- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
167 (Bug #951915).
168
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000169- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
170 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
171 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
172 encoding alias table
173
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000174- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
175
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000176- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
177 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
178
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000179- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
180
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000181- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
182
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000183- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
184
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000185- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
186
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000187- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
188
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000189- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
190 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
191 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
192
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000193- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000194 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000195
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000196- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
197 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
198 tokenizer with very long source lines.
199
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000200- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
201 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
202
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000203- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
204 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000205
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000206- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
207 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
208
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000209- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
210 correctly.
211
212
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000213Build
214-----
215
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000216- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
217 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
218
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000219- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
220 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
221 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
222 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
223 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
224 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
225 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
226 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
227
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000228- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
229 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
230 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
231 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
232
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000233
234C API
235-----
236
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000237- Removed PyRange_New().
238
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000239
240Tests
241-----
242
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000243- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000244
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000245
246Documentation
247-------------
248
249- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
250 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
251 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
252
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000253Mac
254---
255
256
257
258Tools/Demos
259-----------
260
261
262
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000263What's New in Python 2.4 final?
264===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000265
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000266*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000267
268Core and builtins
269-----------------
270
271- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
272 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
273 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
274
275
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000276What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
277==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000278
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000279*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000280
281Core and builtins
282-----------------
283
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000284- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
285 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
286 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
287
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000288
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000289Library
290-------
291
292- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
293 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
294 raised is re-raised.
295
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000296- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
297 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
298
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000299- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
300 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
301 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
302 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
303 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
304 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
305 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
306 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
307 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
308 by the slice are recomputed now.
309
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000310- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000311
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000312Build
313-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000314
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000315- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
316 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
317 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000318
319C API
320-----
321
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000322- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
323
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000324
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000325What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
326================================
327
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000328*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000329
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000330License
331-------
332
333The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
334is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
335changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
336Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
337intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
338durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
339the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
340License::
341
342 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
343
344says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
345to Python 2.1.1.
346
347The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
348License Version 2.
349
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000350Core and builtins
351-----------------
352
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000353- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
354 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
355 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
356 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
357 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
358 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
359 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
360 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
361 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
362 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
363
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000364- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000365
366Extension Modules
367-----------------
368
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000369- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
370 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
371 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
372 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000373
374Library
375-------
376
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000377- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
378 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
379 returned.
380
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000381- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
382
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000383- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
384 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
385
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000386- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
387
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000388- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
389 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000390
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000391- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
392
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000393- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
394
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000395- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000396 the source code is updated and reloaded.
397
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000398Build
399-----
400
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000401- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000402
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000403What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
404================================
405
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000406*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000407
408Core and builtins
409-----------------
410
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000411- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000412 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
413
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000414- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
415 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
416 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
417 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
418
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000419- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
420 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
421
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000422- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
423 constant.
424
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000425- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
426 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
427 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
428 large), and to anomalies such as
429 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
430 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
431 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
432 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000433
434Extension modules
435-----------------
436
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000437- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
438 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000439 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
440 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
441 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000442
443Library
444-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000445
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000446- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000447 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000448 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
449 --swig-cpp.
450
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000451- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
452 it is set.
453
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000454- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000455
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000456- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
457 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
458 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
459 Closes bug #1039270.
460
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000461- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000462
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000463 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000464 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
465 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
466 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
467 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
468 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
469 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
470 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
471 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
472 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
473 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
474 + Updates to documentation.
475
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000476- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
477 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
478 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
479 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
480
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000481- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000482
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000483- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
484 applications should use the getmember function.
485
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000486- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
487
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000488- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
489 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
490 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
491 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
492 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
493 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
494 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
495 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
496 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
497
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000498- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
499 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000500 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000501
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000502- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
503 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
504 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
505 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
506 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
507 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
508 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
509 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000510
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000511- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
512 the new public features (of which there are many).
513
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000514- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000515 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
516 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
517 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
518 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000519 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000520
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000521- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
522
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000523- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
524 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
525 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
526 options.
527
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000528- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
529 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
530 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
531 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
532 conditions under which non-string values work.
533
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000534Build
535-----
536
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000537- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
538 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
539 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
540
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000541- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
542 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
543 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
544 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
545 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000546
547C API
548-----
549
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000550- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
551 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
552
553- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
554
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000555- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
556 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
557 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
558 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
559 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
560 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
561 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
562 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
563 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
564
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000565- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
566
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000567- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
568 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
569 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000570
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000571Tests
572-----
573
574- test__locale ported to unittest
575
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000576Mac
577---
578
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000579- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
580 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
581 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000582
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000583Tools/Demos
584-----------
585
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000586- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
587 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
588 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
589 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
590 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000591
592
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000593What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
594=================================
595
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000596*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000597
598Core and builtins
599-----------------
600
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000601- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000602 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
603
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000604- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
605 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
606 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
607 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
608 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
609 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
610 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
611 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000612 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
613 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
614 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
615 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
616 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000617
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000618- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
619 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
620 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
621 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
622 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
623
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000624- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
625
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000626- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
627 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
628
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000629- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
630 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
631 modified the list.
632
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000633- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
634 functions is now writable.
635
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000636- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
637 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
638 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
639 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
640
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000641- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
642 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
643 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
644 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
645 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000646
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000647- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
648 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
649
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000650Extension modules
651-----------------
652
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000653- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
654
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000655- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
656 data.
657
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000658- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
659 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
660 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
661 supposed to have been truncated away.
662
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000663- Added socket.socketpair().
664
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000665- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
666 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
667
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000668- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000669 versions of Python, have now been removed.
670
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000671Library
672-------
673
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000674- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000675 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000676
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000677- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
678 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
679
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000680- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
681 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
682
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000683- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
684
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000685- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
686 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000687
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000688- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
689 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
690
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000691- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
692
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000693- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
694
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000695- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
696
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000697- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
698 Percivall.
699
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000700- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
701 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
702
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000703- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
704 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
705 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000706 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000707
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000708- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
709 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
710 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
711 and exponent.
712
713- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
714
715- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
716 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
717 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
718
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000719- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
720 to the readline module.
721
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000722- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000723 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
724 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000725
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000726- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
727 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
728 contains symlinks.
729
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000730- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
731 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
732
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000733- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
734 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
735 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
736
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000737- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
738 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
739 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
740 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
741 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
742 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
743 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
744 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
745 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
746 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
747 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
748 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
749 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
750
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000751- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
752
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000753Tools/Demos
754-----------
755
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000756- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
757 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
758
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000759- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
760
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000761Build
762-----
763
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000764- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
765 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
766 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
767 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
768 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
769 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
770 plans to do so.
771
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000772- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
773 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
774
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000775- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
776 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
777
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000778- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
779 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
780
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000781- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
782 GNU/k*BSD systems.
783
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000784- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
785 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
786
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000787C API
788-----
789
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000790..
791
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000792Documentation
793-------------
794
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000795- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
796 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
797
798- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
799 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
800 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000801
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000802New platforms
803-------------
804
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000805- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
806
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000807Tests
808-----
809
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000810..
811
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000812Windows
813-------
814
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000815- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
816 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
817 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
818 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
819 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
820 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
821 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
822 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
823 the problem.
824
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000825Mac
826---
827
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000828..
829
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000830
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000831What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
832=================================
833
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000834*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000835
836Core and builtins
837-----------------
838
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000839- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
840 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
841 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
842 sensitive code.
843
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000844- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000845 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000846
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000847 @staticmethod
848 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000849
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000850 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000851
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000852- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
853 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
854 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
855 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
856 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
857 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
858 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
859 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
860 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
861 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
862 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
863
864 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
865 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
866 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
867 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
868 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
869 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
870 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
871
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000872- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
873 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
874
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000875- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000876 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000877
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000878- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000879 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000880 which was missing for no apparent reason.
881
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000882- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000883 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
884 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
885
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000886- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
887 types that support garbage collection.
888
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000889- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
890
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000891- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
892 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
893 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
894 Jython.
895
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000896- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
897
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000898- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
899 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
900
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000901- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
902 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
903 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000904
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000905- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
906 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
907 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
908
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000909Extension modules
910-----------------
911
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000912- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
913
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000914Library
915-------
916
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000917- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
918 TIS-620
919
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000920- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
921 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
922 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
923 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
924 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
925 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
926 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
927 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
928 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
929 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
930
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000931- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
932
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000933- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
934 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
935 same as when the argument is omitted).
936 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
937
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000938- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
939
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000940- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
941 schemes are offered.
942
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000943- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
944
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000945- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
946 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
947 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
948
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000949- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
950
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000951- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
952 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
953
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000954- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
955 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
956 when dummy_threading is being used.
957
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000958- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
959 from a tarfile.
960
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000961- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000962 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000963
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000964- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
965 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
966 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
967 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
968
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000969- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
970 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
971
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000972- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
973 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
974 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
975 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
976 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
977 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
978 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
979 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
980 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
981 by some other method in progress).
982
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000983- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
984 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
985 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000986
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000987- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
988
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000989- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
990 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
991 AM Kuchling.
992
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000993- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
994 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
995 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
996
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000997- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
998 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
999 instead of unsigned.
1000
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001001- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001002 no longer part of the public API.
1003
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001004- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1005 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1006 string methods of the same name).
1007
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001008- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001009 SF patch 945642.
1010
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001011- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1012
1013 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1014
1015 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1016 DocTestSuites.
1017
1018- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1019 that provide thread-local data.
1020
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001021- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1022 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1023
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001024- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1025
1026- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1027 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1028 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1029
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001030- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1031
1032 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1033 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1034 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001035
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001036 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1037 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1038 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1039 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1040
1041 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1042 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1043
1044 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1045 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1046 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1047 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1048
1049 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1050 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1051 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1052 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1053 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1054
1055 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1056 wrapping help output.
1057
1058 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1059 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1060 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001061
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001062C API
1063-----
1064
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001065- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1066 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1067 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1068 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1069 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1070 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1071 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1072 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1073 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1074 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1075 its visible semantics have not changed.
1076
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001077- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1078 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1079
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001080Documentation
1081-------------
1082
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001083- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001084
1085 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001086 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001087
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001088 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001089
1090 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1091
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001092- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001093
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001094Tests
1095-----
1096
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001097- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001098 platforms that use the Makefile.
1099
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001100- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1101 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1102 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1103
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001104
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001105What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1106=================================
1107
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001108*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001109
1110Core and builtins
1111-----------------
1112
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001113- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1114 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1115 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1116 objects now (one object instead of three).
1117
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001118- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1119 Windows DLLs.
1120
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001121- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1122 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001123
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001124- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1125 a new .pyc magic.
1126
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001127- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1128 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1129 be there.
1130
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001131- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1132 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1133 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1134
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001135- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1136 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1137 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1138
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001139- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1140
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001141- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1142 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1143 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001144
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001145- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1146 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1147
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001148- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1149
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001150- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001151 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001152
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001153- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1154
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001155- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1156
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001157- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1158 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1159
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001160- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1161 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1162 Fixes bug #858016 .
1163
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001164- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1165 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1166 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1167
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001168- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1169 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1170 improves their performance (about 35%).
1171
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001172- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1173 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1174 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1175
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001176- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1177 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1178 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1179 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1180
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001181- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1182 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1183 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1184 length is not known).
1185
1186- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1187 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001188 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1189 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001190 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1191
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001192- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1193 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1194
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001195- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1196 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1197 keyword arguments.
1198
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001199- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1200 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1201 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1202
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001203- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1204 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1205 cases.
1206
1207- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1208 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1209 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1210 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1211 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1212 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1213 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1214 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1215 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1216 a release build.
1217
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001218- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1219 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1220
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001221- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001222 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001223
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001224- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1225 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1226 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1227 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1228 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1229 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1230 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1231 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1232 destroyed.
1233
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001234- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1235 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1236 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1237 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1238 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1239 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1240 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1241 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1242
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001243- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1244 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1245 character other than a space.
1246
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001247- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1248 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1249 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1250 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1251 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1252 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1253 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1254 attributes with the same name.
1255
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001256- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1257 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1258 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1259 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1260 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1261 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1262 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1263 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1264 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1265 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1266 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1267 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1268 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1269 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001270
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001271- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1272 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1273 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1274 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1275 This has been repaired.
1276
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001277- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1278
1279- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1280
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001281- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1282 over a sequence.
1283
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001284- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001285 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001286
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001287- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1288
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001289- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1290 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1291 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1292 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1293 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1294 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1295 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1296 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1297
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001298- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1299 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1300 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1301
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001302- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1303 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1304 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1305 freelist.
1306
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001307- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1308 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1309
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001310- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1311 number.
1312
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001313- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1314 a TypeError exception.
1315
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001316- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1317 820195.
1318
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001319- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1320 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1321 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1322
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001323- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001324 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1325 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001326
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001327- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1328 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1329 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1330
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001331- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1332 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001333 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001334
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001335- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001336 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1337 the first call.
1338
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001339
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001340Extension modules
1341-----------------
1342
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001343- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1344 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1345
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001346- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1347 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1348 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1349 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1350 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1351 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1352 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001353
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001354- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1355
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001356- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1357
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001358- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1359 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1360
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001361- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1362 fewer false positives.
1363
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001364- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1365 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1366
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001367- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001368 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1369
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001370- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001371 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001372 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001373 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1374 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001375
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001376- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1377 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1378 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1379 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1380
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001381- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1382 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1383 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1384 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1385 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1386 #897625.
1387
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001388- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1389 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1390
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001391- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1392 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1393 and pops on either side of the deque.
1394
1395- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1396 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1397
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001398- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1399 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1400 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1401 other functions that expect a function argument.
1402
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001403- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1404
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001405- os.getsid was added.
1406
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001407- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1408 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1409 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1410
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001411- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1412
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001413- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1414
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001415- readline.clear_history was added.
1416
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001417- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1418
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001419- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1420
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001421- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1422
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001423- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1424
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001425- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1426
1427- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1428
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001429- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1430
1431- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1432
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001433- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1434 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1435 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1436
1437- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1438 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1439 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1440 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1441 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1442 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1443 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1444
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001445- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1446 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1447 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1448 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001449
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001450- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001451 iterators from a single iterable.
1452
1453- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1454 of raising a TypeError exception.
1455
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001456- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1457 as parameter.
1458
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001459Library
1460-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001461
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001462- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1463 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1464 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001465
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001466- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1467 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1468 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001469
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001470- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001471
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001472- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1473 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001474
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001475- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1476 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1477
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001478- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1479
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001480- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001481 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001482
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001483- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001484 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001485
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001486- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1487
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001488- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1489 on cygwin and mingw32.
1490
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001491- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1492
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001493- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1494 module.
1495
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001496- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1497 installation scheme for all platforms.
1498
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001499- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001500 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001501
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001502- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1503 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1504 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1505
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001506- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1507 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1508 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1509
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001510- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1511
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001512- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1513
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001514- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1515 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1516
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001517- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1518 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1519 type pattern with the same value exists.
1520
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001521- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1522 when run from the command prompt).
1523
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001524- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1525 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1526
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001527- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1528 default sort).
1529
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001530- Added global runctx function to profile module
1531
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001532- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1533
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001534- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1535
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001536- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1537
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001538- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001539 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1540 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1541 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1542 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1543 accordingly.
1544
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001545- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1546 decoding standards.
1547
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001548- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1549 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1550 called for all requests.
1551
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001552- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1553 they are passed to the compiler.
1554
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001555- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1556 indent, width and depth.
1557
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001558- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1559 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1560
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001561- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1562 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1563
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001564- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1565
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001566- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1567
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001568- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1569
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001570- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1571 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1572
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001573- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001574 for better performance.
1575
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001576- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001577
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001578- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1579 a string).
1580
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001581- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1582
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001583- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1584
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001585- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1586
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001587- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1588
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001589- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1590 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1591 list of fieldnames.
1592
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001593- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1594 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1595
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001596- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1597
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001598- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1599 empty lists.
1600
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001601- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1602 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1603 and shelves.
1604
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001605- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1606 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1607
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001608- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001609 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1610 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001611
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001612- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1613 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001614 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001615
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001616- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001617 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1618 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1619
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001620- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1621 and removed in Py2.4.
1622
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001623- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1624
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001625- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1626
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001627Tools/Demos
1628-----------
1629
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001630- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1631 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1632
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001633- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1634
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001635- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1636 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1637 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1638 destination in situations where both files are given.
1639
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001640- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1641 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1642 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1643 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1644
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001645- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1646
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001647- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1648 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1649 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1650 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1651 now.
1652
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001653- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1654 in effect
1655
1656- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1657 C-c C-h
1658
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001659- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1660 -d option was given.
1661
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001662Build
1663-----
1664
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001665- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1666 build under OS X.
1667
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001668- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1669 --enable-profiling.
1670
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001671- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1672 is configured --with-tsc.
1673
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001674- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1675 on AMD64.
1676
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001677- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1678 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1679
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001680- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1681 removed.
1682
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001683- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1684 supported (see PEP 11).
1685
1686- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1687
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001688- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1689
1690- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1691 (see PEP 11).
1692
1693- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1694 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1695
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001696C API
1697-----
1698
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001699- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1700 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1701 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1702
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001703- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1704 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1705 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1706 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1707
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001708- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1709 generator objects.
1710
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001711- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1712 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001713 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1714 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001715
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001716- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1717 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1718
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001719- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1720 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1721 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1722 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1723 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1724
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001725- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1726 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1727 about 10% faster.
1728
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001729- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1730 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1731
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001732- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1733 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1734 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1735 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1736
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001737Windows
1738-------
1739
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001740- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1741 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1742 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1743 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1744
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001745- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1746 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1747 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1748
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001749
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001750What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1751===============================
1752
1753*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1754
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001755IDLE
1756----
1757
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001758- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1759 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1760 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1761 context-menu actions.
1762
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001763- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1764 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1765 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1766 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1767 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1768 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1769 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1770 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1771 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1772
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001773
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001774What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1775=============================================
1776
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001777*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001778
1779Core and builtins
1780-----------------
1781
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001782- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001783 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001784 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1785
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001786Extension modules
1787-----------------
1788
1789- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1790 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1791 than once. This has been fixed.
1792
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001793- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1794 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1795 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1796 call.
1797
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001798- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1799
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001800Library
1801-------
1802
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001803- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1804 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1805
1806- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1807 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1808 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1809 restored.
1810
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001811IDLE
1812----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001813
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001814- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001815
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001816Build
1817-----
1818
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001819- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1820 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1821
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001822C API
1823-----
1824
1825Windows
1826-------
1827
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001828- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1829 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1830
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001831- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1832
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001833Mac
1834---
1835
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001836- Various fixes to pimp.
1837
1838- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1839
1840- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1841 more problems than it solves.
1842
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001843
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001844What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1845=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001846
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001847*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1848
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001849Core and builtins
1850-----------------
1851
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001852- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1853 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1854
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001855- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1856 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001857 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001858
1859- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1860 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1861 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001862 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001863
1864- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1865 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001866
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001867- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1868 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1869 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1870
1871- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001872 770247.
1873
1874- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001875
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001876Extension modules
1877-----------------
1878
1879- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1880 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1881
1882- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1883
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001884- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1885
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001886- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1887 contained within the _strptime module.
1888
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001889- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1890 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1891
1892- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001893 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1894
1895- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1896 the find_class attribute, if present.
1897
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001898- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001899
1900 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1901 (SF bug 763298).
1902
1903 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001904 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1905 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1906 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001907
1908 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1909
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001910Library
1911-------
1912
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001913- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1914
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001915- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1916 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1917 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1918 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1919 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1920 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1921 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1922 or Tester().
1923
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001924- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1925 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1926 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1927 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1928 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1929 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1930 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1931 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1932 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001933
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001934 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001935
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001936- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1937 weren't before was an oversight.
1938
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001939- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1940 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1941
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001942- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1943 when there are no lines.
1944
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001945- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1946 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1947
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001948- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1949 to child processes.
1950
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001951- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1952
1953- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1954
1955- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1956 xmlrpclib.
1957
1958- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1959 responses.
1960
1961- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1962 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1963
1964- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1965 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1966 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1967
1968- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1969 used as patterns.
1970
1971- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1972 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1973 than Tk 8.3.
1974
1975- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1976
1977- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001978
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001979Tools/Demos
1980-----------
1981
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001982- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1983
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001984- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1985
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001986- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001987
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001988Build
1989-----
1990
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001991- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1992
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001993- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1994
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001995- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1996 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001997
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001998- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1999 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2000 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002001
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002002C API
2003-----
2004
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002005- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2006 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2007
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002008Windows
2009-------
2010
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002011- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2012 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2013 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2014 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2015 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2016 Python exception ::
2017
2018 thread.error: can't start new thread
2019
2020 is raised now.
2021
2022- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2023 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2024 instead of from DLL teardown.
2025
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002026Mac
2027---
2028
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002029- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002030 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002031 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2032 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2033 the executable in the bundle.
2034
2035- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002036
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002037- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2038
2039- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2040 on Panther.
2041
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002042What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2043================================
2044
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002045*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002046
2047Core and builtins
2048-----------------
2049
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002050- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2051 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2052 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2053 with the -i option.
2054
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002055- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2056 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2057
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002058- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2059 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2060
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002061- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2062 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2063 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2064 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2065 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2066 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2067 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2068 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2069 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2070 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2071 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2072 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2073 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002074
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002075- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2076 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2077 embedded in a lambda expression.
2078
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002079- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2080 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2081 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2082 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2083 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2084
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002085- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2086 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2087 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2088
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002089- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2090 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2091
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002092- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2093 It's writable again.
2094
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002095- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2096 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2097 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002098 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002099
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002100- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2101 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2102 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2103
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002104Extension modules
2105-----------------
2106
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002107- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2108 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2109
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002110- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2111 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2112 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2113 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2114
2115- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2116 collection.
2117
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002118- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2119 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2120 unique within a single program run.
2121
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002122- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2123 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2124
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002125- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2126 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2127
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002128- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2129 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002130
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002131- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2132
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002133- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2134 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2135
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002136- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2137 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2138 for many BSD-derived systems.
2139
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002140
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002141Library
2142-------
2143
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002144- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2145 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2146 primary ones:
2147
2148 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2149 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2150 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2151
2152 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2153 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2154 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2155 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2156 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2157 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2158
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002159- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2160 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2161 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2162 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2163 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2164 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2165 argument.
2166
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002167- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2168 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2169 in the archive.
2170
2171- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2172 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2173
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002174- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2175 569574).
2176
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002177- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2178 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2179 no more.
2180
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002181- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2182 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2183 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2184 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2185 code coverage.
2186
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002187- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2188 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2189 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002190 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2191 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002192
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002193- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2194 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2195 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002196 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002197
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002198- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2199
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002200- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2201 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2202 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2203 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2204
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002205- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2206 handling.
2207
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002208- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2209 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2210
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002211- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2212 in socket.py.
2213
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002214- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2215
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002216- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2217 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2218 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2219 opener with proxy support.
2220
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002221- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2222
2223- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2224
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002225Tools/Demos
2226-----------
2227
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002228- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2229
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002230- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2231
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002232- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2233 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002234
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002235- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2236 files.
2237
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002238Build
2239-----
2240
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002241- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002242 different root directory.
2243
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002244C API
2245-----
2246
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002247- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2248 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2249 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2250 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2251 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2252 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2253 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2254 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2255 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2256 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2257
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002258- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2259 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2260 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2261 from Python.
2262
2263
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002264New platforms
2265-------------
2266
2267None this time.
2268
2269Tests
2270-----
2271
2272- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2273 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2274
2275Windows
2276-------
2277
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002278- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2279
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002280- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2281 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2282 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2283 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2284 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2285 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2286 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2287 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2288 that's what it's for.
2289
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002290Mac
2291---
2292
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002293- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2294 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2295 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2296 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002297- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2298 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2299- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002300
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002301SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2302------------------------------------
2303
2304430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2305598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2306622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2307661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2308683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2309697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2310713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2311724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2312727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2313729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2314730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2315731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2316732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2317733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2318735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2319740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2320744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2321745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2322747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2323749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2324751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2325753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2326755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2327757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2328760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2329
2330
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002331What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2332================================
2333
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002334*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002335
2336Core and builtins
2337-----------------
2338
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002339- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2340 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2341
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002342- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2343 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2344 and cannot be strings).
2345
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002346- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2347 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2348 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2349 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2350
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002351- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2352 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2353 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2354 Python itself.
2355
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002356- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2357 the referenced object, if it has one.
2358
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002359- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2360 the thread started at
2361 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2362
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002363- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2364 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2365 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2366 placed on a list index.
2367
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002368- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2369 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2370 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2371 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2372
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002373- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2374 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2375 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2376 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2377 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2378 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2379 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2380
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002381- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2382 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2383 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2384 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2385 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2386
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002387- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2388 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002389
2390- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2391 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2392 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2393 #693195.)
2394
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002395- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2396 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002397
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002398- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002399 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002400 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2401 interpreter executions, would fail.
2402
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002403- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002404 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002405 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002406
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002407Extension modules
2408-----------------
2409
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002410- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2411 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2412 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2413 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2414
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002415- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2416 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2417
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002418- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2419 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2420 and Greg Chapman.)
2421
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002422- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2423 recursively.
2424
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002425- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002426 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2427 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2428 leaks.
2429
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002430- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2431
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002432- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2433 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2434 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2435 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2436 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2437 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2438 #705836.
2439
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002440- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002441 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2442
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002443- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2444 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2445 See SF bug #692416.
2446
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002447- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2448 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2449
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002450- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2451 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2452 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002453
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002454- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002455 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2456 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2457
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002458- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2459 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2460 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2461 timeouts to work properly.
2462
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002463Library
2464-------
2465
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002466- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2467 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2468 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2469 future release.
2470
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002471- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2472 for querying platform dependent features.
2473
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002474- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002475
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002476- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2477 pickle protocol versions.
2478
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002479- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2480 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2481 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2482
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002483- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2484
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002485- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2486 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2487 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2488 modules.
2489
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002490- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2491 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2492 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2493
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002494- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2495 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2496
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002497- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2498 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2499 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2500
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002501- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002502 MS Office extensions.
2503
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002504- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2505 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2506
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002507- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2508 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2509
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002510- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2511 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2512 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2513 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2514 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2515 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2516
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002517- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2518 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2519 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002520
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002521- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2522 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2523 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2524
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002525- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2526
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002527- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2528 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2529 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2530
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002531Tools/Demos
2532-----------
2533
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002534- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2535 See the module docstring for details.
2536
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002537Build
2538-----
2539
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002540- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2541 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002542
2543C API
2544-----
2545
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002546- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2547
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002548- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2549 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2550 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2551
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002552- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2553 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002554
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002555 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2556 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2557 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002558
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002559- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002560 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2561
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002562- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2563 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2564 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002565
2566New platforms
2567-------------
2568
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002569None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002570
2571Tests
2572-----
2573
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002574- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2575 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002576
2577Windows
2578-------
2579
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002580- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2581 function.
2582
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002583- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2584 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002585
2586Mac
2587---
2588
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002589- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2590 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002591
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002592- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2593 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002594
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002595- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2596 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2597 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002598
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002599- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002600 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2601 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002602
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002603- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2604 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002605
2606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002607What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2608=================================
2609
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002610*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002611
2612Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002613-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002614
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002615- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2616 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2617 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2618
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002619- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2620 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2621 (SF patch #664376.)
2622
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002623- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2624 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2625 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2626 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2627 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2628 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002629 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002630
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002631- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2632 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2633 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2634 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002635 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002636
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002637- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2638 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2639 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2640 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2641 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2642 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2643 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2644 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2645 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2646 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2647 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2648
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002649- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2650 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2651 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2652 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2653 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2654 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2655
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002656- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2657 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2658
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002659- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2660 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2661 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2662 case.)
2663
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002664- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2665 passed as unicode strings.
2666
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002667- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2668 See SF bug #683467.
2669
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002670- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2671 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2672
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002673- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2674
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002675- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2676
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002677- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2678 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2679 arguments.
2680
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002681- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2682 See SF bug #667147.
2683
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002684- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002685 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002686 See SF bug #676155.
2687
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002688- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002689 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002690 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2691 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2692 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2693 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2694 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2695 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002696
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002697Extension modules
2698-----------------
2699
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002700- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2701 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2702 tp_as_number pointer.
2703
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002704- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2705 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2706 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2707 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2708 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2709
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002710- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2711
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002712- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2713
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002714- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002715 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002716 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2717 patch #678531.)
2718
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002719- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2720 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2721
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002722- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2723 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2724
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002725- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2726
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002727- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2728 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2729 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2730
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002731- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2732
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002733- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2734 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2735
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002736- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002737
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002738- datetime changes:
2739
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002740 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2741
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002742 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2743 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2744 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2745 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2746 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2747 now.
2748
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002749 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002750 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2751 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002752
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002753 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002754 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002755 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2756 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2757 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2758 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002759
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002760 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2761 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2762 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002763 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2764
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002765 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2766 by a later example coded by Guido.
2767
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002768 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002769 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2770 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2771 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002772 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2773 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2774
2775 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2776 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2777 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2778 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2779 tzinfo subclass instance.
2780
2781 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2782 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2783 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2784 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2785 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2786 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2787 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2788 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002789
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002790 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2791 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2792 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2793 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2794 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002795 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2796
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002797 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002798
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002799 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2800 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2801 as a naive datetime object.
2802
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002803 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2804 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2805 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2806
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002807 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2808 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2809 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2810 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2811 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2812 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2813 comparison.
2814
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002815 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2816 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2817 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2818 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002819 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002820
2821 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002822
2823 and ::
2824
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002825 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2826
2827 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2828 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2829 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2830 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2831
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002832 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2833 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2834 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2835 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2836 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2837
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002838 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2839 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002840 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2841 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002842
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002843Library
2844-------
2845
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002846- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2847 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2848
2849- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2850 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2851 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2852 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2853 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2854 See PEP 307 for details.
2855
2856- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2857 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2858
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002859- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2860 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002861 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002862 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2863 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002864 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002865
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002866- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2867 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2868
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002869- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2870 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2871 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2872
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002873- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2874
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002875- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2876 exception.
2877
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002878- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2879 class.
2880
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002881- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2882 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2883 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2884
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002885- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2886 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2887
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002888- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002889 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2890 See SF bug #659228.
2891
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002892- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2893 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2894 See SF patch #651082.
2895
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002896- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002897
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002898- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2899 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2900
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002901- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002902 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002903
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002904- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2905 DOS paths from other platforms.
2906
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002907Tools/Demos
2908-----------
2909
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002910- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2911 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2912 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2913 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2914 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2915 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2916 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2917 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2918 example:
2919
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002920 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2921 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002922
2923 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2924
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002925
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002926Build
2927-----
2928
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002929- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2930 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2931 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002932 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2933
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002934 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2935
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002936- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2937 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2938 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2939 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2940 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2941 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2942 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2943 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2944 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2945
2946- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2947 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2948 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2949 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2950
2951- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2952 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2953
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002954C API
2955-----
2956
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002957- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2958 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002959
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002960- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2961 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2962 tp_as_number pointer.
2963
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002964- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2965 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2966 (SF #681367)
2967
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002968- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2969 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2970 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2971 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002972
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002973Tests
2974-----
2975
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002976- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002977 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2978 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2979 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2980 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2981 pydoc.)
2982
2983- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2984
2985- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002986
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002987Windows
2988-------
2989
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002990- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2991 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2992 time).
2993
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002994- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2995 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2996
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002997- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2998 release without strong cryptography.
2999
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003000- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003001 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003002
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003003- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3004 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3005
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003006Mac
3007---
3008
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003009- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3010 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003011
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003012- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3013 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3014 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003015
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003016- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3017 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003018
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003019- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3020 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3021 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3022 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003023
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003024- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003025 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3026 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3027 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003029
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003030What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003031=================================
3032
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003033*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003035Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003037
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003038- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3039
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003040- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3041 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003042 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003043 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003044 a different meaning than before.
3045
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003046- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003047 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003048 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003049
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003050- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003051 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003052 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003053
3054- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3055 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3056 and deallocation.
3057
3058- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3059 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3060
3061- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3062 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3063 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3064 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3065 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3066
3067- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3068 now detected by the garbage collector.
3069
3070- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3071 [SF bug 519621]
3072
3073- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3074 identifier.
3075
3076- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3077 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3078 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3079 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3080 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3081 [SF bug 563060]
3082
3083- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3084 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3085 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3086 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3087 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3088
3089- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3090 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3091 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3092
3093- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3094
3095- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3096 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3097 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3098 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3099 state of the slots would be lost.)
3100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003101Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003103
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003104- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003105 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3106 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3107 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3108 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003109 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3110 Jython 2.1.
3111
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003112- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003113 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003114 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3115 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3116 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3117 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3118 these, see PEP 302.
3119
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003120- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3121 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3122 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3123
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003124- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3125 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3126 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3127
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003128- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3129 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3130 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3131
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003132- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3133 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3134 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3135 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3136 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3137 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3138 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3139 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3140 releases or implementations.
3141
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003142- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003143 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3144 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003145
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003146- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3147 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3148
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003149- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3150 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3151 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3152
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003153- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3154 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3155
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003156- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3157 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003158 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3159 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003160
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003161- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3162 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3163 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3164 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3165 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3166
3167 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3168 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3169 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3170 pattern.
3171
3172 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3173 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3174 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3175 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3176
3177 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3178 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3179 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3180 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3181 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3182 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3183
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003184- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3185 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3186 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3187 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3188 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3189 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3190 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3191 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003192
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003193- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3194 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3195 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3196 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3197 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003198 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3199 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3200 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3201 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3202 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3203 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3204 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003205
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003206- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3207 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3208
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003209- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3210 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3211 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3212 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3213 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3214 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3215 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3216 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3217 to Zack Weinberg!
3218
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003219- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3220 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3221 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3222 type. This has been fixed now.
3223
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003224- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3225 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3226 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3227
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003228- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3229 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3230 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3231 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3232 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3233 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3234 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3235 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003236 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003237
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003238- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3239 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3240 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003241
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003242- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3243 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3244 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3245 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3246 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3247 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3248 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3249 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003250 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003251 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3252 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3253
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003254- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3255 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3256 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3257 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3258 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3259 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3260 this.)
3261
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003262- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3263 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003264 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003265 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003266 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3267 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003268 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3269 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003270
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003271- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3272 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3273 currently running.
3274
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003275- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3276 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3277 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3278 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3279
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003280- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3281 as directory names.
3282
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003283- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3284 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3285
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003286- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3287 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3288
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003289- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003290 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3291 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003292
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003293- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3294 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3295 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3296 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3297 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3298
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003299- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3300 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3301 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3302 removed.
3303
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003304- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3305 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3306 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3307
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003308- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3309 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3310 to __debug__.
3311
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003312- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3313 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3314 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3315
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003316- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3317 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3318 deprecated now.
3319
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003320- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3321 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3322 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003323
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003324- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3325 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3326 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3327 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3328 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003329
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003330- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3331 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3332
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003333- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3334 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3335 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003336 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003337 is backward compatible.
3338
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003339- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3340 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3341 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3342 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3343 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3344
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003345- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3346 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3347 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3348 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3349 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3350 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003351
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003352- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3353 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3354
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003355- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3356 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3357
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003358- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3359 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3360 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3361 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3362 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3363
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003364- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3365 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3366 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3367
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003368- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003369 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3370
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003371- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3372 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3373 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003374
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003375- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3376 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3377
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003378- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3379 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3380 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3381
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003382- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3383
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003384Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003386
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003387- Added three operators to the operator module:
3388 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3389 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3390 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3391
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003392- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3393
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003394- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3395 archives.
3396
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003397- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3398 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3399 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3400
3401 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3402
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003403- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3404 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3405 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003406 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003407
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003408- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3409 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3410 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3411 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003412 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3413 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3414 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3415 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003416
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003417- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3418 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003419
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003420- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3421
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003422- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3423 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3424
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003425- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3426 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3427 supported.
3428
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003429- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3430
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003431- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3432 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003433
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003434- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3435 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3436
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003437- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3438
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003439- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3440 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3441
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003442- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3443 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3444 functions but callable type objects.
3445
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003446- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003447 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003448 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003449
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003450- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3451 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003452
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003453- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3454 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003455
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003456- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3457 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3458 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3459 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3460
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003461- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3462 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003463
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003464- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3465 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3466 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3467 and __imul__.
3468
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003469- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003470 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3471 is called.
3472
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003473- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3474 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3475 interpreter was compiled.
3476
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003477- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3478 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3479 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003480 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003481 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3482 1, not 2.
3483
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003484- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3485 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3486 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3487 limit.
3488
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003489- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3490 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3491 bug #623464.
3492
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003493- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3494 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3495 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3496 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3497
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003498Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003500
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003501- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3502
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003503- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3504 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3505 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3506 with Python 2.3a2.
3507
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003508- os.path exposes getctime.
3509
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003510- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003511 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003512 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003513 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003514 unit tests of floating point results.
3515
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003516- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3517 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3518 has been increased.
3519
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003520- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3521 executed.
3522
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003523- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3524 postinstallation script.
3525
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003526- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3527 test the current module.
3528
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003529- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003530 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3531 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3532 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3533 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3534
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003535- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003536 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003537 Ward's Optik package.
3538
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003539- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3540 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3541 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3542 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3543
3544- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3545 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003546 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003547
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003548- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3549 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3550 shelf are binary pickles.
3551
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003552- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3553 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3554
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003555- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3556 modules are iterators now.
3557
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003558- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3559 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3560 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3561 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3562 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3563 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003564
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003565- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3566 with their entity value.
3567
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003568- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3569
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003570- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3571 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003572
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003573- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3574 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003575 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003576
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003577- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3578 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3579 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3580 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3581 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3582 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3583 main():
3584
3585 import locale
3586 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3587
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003588- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3589 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3590
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003591- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3592 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3593 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3594 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3595 to the new standard.
3596
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003597- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3598 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3599 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3600 an extension to the database.
3601
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003602- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3603 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3604 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3605 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003606 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003607
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003608- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003609 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003610
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003611- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3612 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3613 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3614 bounded integers.
3615
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003616- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3617 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3618 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3619 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3620 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3621 in existence.
3622
3623 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3624 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3625 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3626 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3627 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3628 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3629
3630 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3631 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3632 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3633 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3634
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003635- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3636 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3637 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3638
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003639- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3640
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003641- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3642 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3643 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3644 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3645
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003646- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3647 argument.
3648
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003649- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3650 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3651 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3652 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3653 [SF patch 560794].
3654
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003655- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3656 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3657 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003658 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3659 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3660 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003661
3662- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3663 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003664
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003665- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3666 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3667 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3668 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003669
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003670- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3671 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3672 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3673 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3674 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3675
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003676- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003677
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003678- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3679
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003680- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3681 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3682 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3683 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3684 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3685 identical to None.
3686
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003687- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3688 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3689 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3690 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3691 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3692 results now.
3693
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003694- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3695 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3696
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003697- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3698 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3699 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3700 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3701 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3702 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3703 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3704 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3705
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003706- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3707
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003708- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3709 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3710
3711- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3712 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3713 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3714 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3715 and other systems.
3716
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003717- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3718 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3719 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3720 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 +00003721 work well with these.
3722
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003723- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3724
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003725- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003726 connections.
3727
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003728- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3729 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3730 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3731
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003732- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3733 sets
3734
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003735- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3736 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3737 name.
3738
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003739- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3740 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3741 passed in.
3742
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003743- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003744 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003745 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3746 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003747
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003748- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3749
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003750- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3751
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003752- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3753 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3754 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3755
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003756- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3757 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3758 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3759 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003760 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003761
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003762- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003763 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003764 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003765
3766- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3767 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3768 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3769
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003770- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003771 the value of its expression argument.
3772
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003773- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3774 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3775 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3776
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003777- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3778 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3779 skipstone browser was included.
3780
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003781- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3782 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003784Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003786
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003787- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3788 names in addition to accepting file names.
3789
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003790- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3791 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3792 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3793 still used and useful.)
3794
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003795- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3796 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3797 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3798 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003799
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003800- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3801 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3802 the generated binary.
3803
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003804Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003806
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003807- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3808
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003809- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3810 except in the hands of experts.
3811
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003812- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003813 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3814 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3815 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003816
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003817- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3818 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3819 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3820 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3821 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3822 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3823 builds.
3824
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003825- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3826 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3827 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3828 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3829 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3830 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3831 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3832 new type.
3833
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003834- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003835
3836 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3837 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3838 positive infinities.
3839
3840 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3841 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3842 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3843 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3844 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3845 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3846 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3847
3848 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3849
3850 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3851
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003852- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3853 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3854 size of the executable.
3855
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003856- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3857 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3858 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3859 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003860
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003861- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3862
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003863- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3864 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3865 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003866
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003867- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3868 well as Unix.
3869
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003870- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3871 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3872 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3873 modules in the README file for details.
3874
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003875C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003877
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003878- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3879 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003880 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003881 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003882 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003883
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003884- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3885 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3886 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3887 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3888 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3889 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003890 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003891 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3892 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3893 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3894 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3895 aligned.)
3896
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003897- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3898 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3899 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3900
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003901- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3902 level.
3903
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003904- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3905 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3906 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3907 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3908 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3909
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003910- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3911 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3912 code.
3913
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003914- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3915 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3916 adjusting for negative indices.
3917
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003918- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3919 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3920 object.
3921
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003922- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3923 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3924 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3925
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003926- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3927 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003928
3929- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3930
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003931- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3932 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3933 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3934 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3935
3936- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3937
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003938- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003939
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003940- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003941 without going through the buffer API.
3942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003944
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003945- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3946 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3947 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3948 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3949
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003950- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3951 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3952
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003953- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003954 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3955
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003956New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003958
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003959- OpenVMS is now supported.
3960
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003961- AtheOS is now supported.
3962
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003963- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3964
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003965- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3966
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003967Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
3969
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003970- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3971 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3972 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003973
3974Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003976
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003977- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3978 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3979 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3980 bugs.
3981 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003982 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003983 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3984 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003985 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003986
3987- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003988 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003989
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003990- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3991 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3992
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003993- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3994 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003995 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003996 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3997
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003998- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3999 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4000 use files" uninstall option).
4001
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004002- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4003
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004004- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4005 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4006
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004007- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4008 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4009 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4010
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004011- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4012 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4013 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4014 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4015 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004016 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4017 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4018 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004019
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004020- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004021 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004022 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4023 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4024 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4025 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4026 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4027 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4028 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4029 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4030 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4031 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4032 work around.
4033
4034- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4035 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4036 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4037 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4038 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4039 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4040 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4041 specified with O_CREAT too).
4042
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004043Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044----
4045
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004046- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004047
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004048- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4049 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4050 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4051
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004052- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4053 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4054 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4055
4056- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4057 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4058 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4059 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4060 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4061 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4062 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4063 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004064
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004065- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4066 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4067 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004068
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004069- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4070 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4071 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4072 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4073 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004074
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004075- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4076 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4077 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004078
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004079- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4080 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004081
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004082- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4083 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4084 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4085 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4086 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004087
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004088- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4089 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4090 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4091
4092- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4093 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4094 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004096- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4097 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4098 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4099 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004100 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004101
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004102- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4103 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004104
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004105- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4106 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004107
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004108- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004109 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004110 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4111 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004112
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004113
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004114What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004115===============================
4116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4118
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004119Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004121
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004122- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4123 with a custom metaclass.
4124
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004125Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004127
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004128- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4129 are proxies.
4130
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004131Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004133
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004134- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4135 very short strings.
4136
4137- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4138 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4139 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4140 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4141 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4142
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004143Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004146- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4147 close or delete time).
4148
4149- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4150 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4151
4152- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4153
4154- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004155 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004156
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004157Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159
4160Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
4163C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004165
4166New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004168
4169Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004171
4172Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004174
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004175- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4176
4177- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4178 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4179
4180- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4181 deleted at process exit time.
4182
4183- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4184 in backslash.
4185
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004186Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004188
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004189- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4190 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4191 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4192
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004193
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004194What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004195===========================
4196
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4198
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004199Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004201
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004202- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4203 been extensively updated. See
4204
4205 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4206
4207 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4208
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004209- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4210 deleted!
4211
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004212- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4213 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4214 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4215 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4216 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4217
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004218- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4219
4220 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4221 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4222
4223 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4224 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4225 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4226 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4227 supported anyway.
4228
4229 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4230 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4231
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004232- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4233 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4234 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4235 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4236 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004237
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004238- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4239 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4240 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4241
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004242Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004244
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004245- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4246 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4247 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4248 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4249 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4250 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004251 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4252 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4253 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4254 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004255
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004256- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4257 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4258 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4259
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004260Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004262
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004263- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4264
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004267
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004268- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4269 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4270 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4271 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4272 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4273 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4274
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004275- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4276
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004277- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4278
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004279- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4280
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004281- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4282 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4283 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4284
4285- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4286
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004287Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004289
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004290- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4291 off a search on Google.
4292
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004293Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004295
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004296- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4297 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4298 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4299 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4300 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4301 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4302 other platforms should do likewise.
4303
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004304- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4305 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4306 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4307
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004308C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004311- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4312 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4313 producing key-value pairs.
4314
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004315- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004316 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004317 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4318 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4319 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4320 previously went unchallenged.
4321
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004322New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004324
4325Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004327
4328Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004330
4331Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004333
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004334- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4335 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004336
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004337- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4338 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4339 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4340 home.
4341
4342
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004343What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004344===========================
4345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4347
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004348Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004350
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004351- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4352 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004353
4354 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004355 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004356
4357 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4358 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004359 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004360 This needs to be documented.
4361
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004362- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4363 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4364
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004365- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4366 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4367 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4368
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004369- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4370 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4371
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004372- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4373 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4374 class forbids it).
4375
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004376- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4377 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4378 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4379
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004380- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4381
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004384
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004385- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4386 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004387 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004388
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004389- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4390 (like 1 + '').
4391
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004392Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004394
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004395- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4396 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4397 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4398 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004399 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004400 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4401
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004402- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4403 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4404 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4405 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4406
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004407- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4408 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004409 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4410 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4411 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004412
4413- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4414 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004415
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004416- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4417 bytes on its input.
4418
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004419Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004422- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004423 convenience function.
4424
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004425- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4426 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4427 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004428 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4429 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4430 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4431 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4432 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4433 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004434
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004435- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4436 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4437 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4438 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4439
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004440- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4441 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4442 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4443
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004444- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4445 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4446 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4447 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4448
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004449- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4450 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004452 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4453 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4454 new -l and -e options.
4455
4456- statcache is now deprecated.
4457
4458- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4459 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004461 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4462 time properly taken into account.
4463
4464- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4465 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4466 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4467 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4468
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004469Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004471
4472Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004474
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004475- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4476 is built with libdb3 if available.
4477
4478- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4479
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004480C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004482
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004483- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4484 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4485 PySequence_Size().
4486
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004487- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4488
4489- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4490 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4491 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4492
4493- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4494 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4495
4496- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4497 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004499New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004502- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4503 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4504
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004505- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4506 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4507
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004508- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4509
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004510Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004512
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004513- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4514 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4515
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004516Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004518
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004519Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004521
4522- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4523 removed completely in the next release.
4524
4525- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4526 OSX.
4527
4528- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4529 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4530
4531- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004534What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004535===========================
4536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4538
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004539Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004541
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004542- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004543 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004544 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004545 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4546 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004547 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4548 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004549 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4550 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004551
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004552- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4553 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4554
4555- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4556 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4557
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004558Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004560
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004561- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4562 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4563 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4564 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4565 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4566 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4567 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4568 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4569
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004570- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4571 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4572 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4573 example).
4574
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004575- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004576 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004577 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004578 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004579
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004580- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4581 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4582 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004583 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004584
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004585- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4586 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4587 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4588 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4589 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4590 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4591
4592 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4593
4594 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4595
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004596Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004598
4599- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4600
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004601- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4602
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004603- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4604 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004605
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004606- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4607 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4608 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4609 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4610 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4611 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004612 attributes.
4613
4614- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4615 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4616 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004617
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004618- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4619 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4620 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004621
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004622- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4623 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4624 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004625 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4626 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4627
4628- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4629 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004630
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004631Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004633
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004634- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4635 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4636
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004637- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4638 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4639 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4640 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4641
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004642- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4643 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4644 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4645 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4646
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004647 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4648 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4649 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4650 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4651 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4652 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4653 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4654 without losing information).
4655
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004656- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004657 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4658 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4659 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4660 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4661 module).
4662
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004663 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004664 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4665 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4666 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4667 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004668
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004669- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004670 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4671 encoding.
4672
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004673- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4674 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4675
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004677 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4678
4679- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4680 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4681 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4682 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4683
4684- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4685
4686- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4687 ON, and OFF.
4688
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004689- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4690 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4691
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004692Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004694
4695- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4696 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4697 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004698
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004699- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4700 been added: -X and -E.
4701
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004702Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004704
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004705- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4706 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4707
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004708C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004710
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004711- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4712 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4713 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4714 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4715 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4716
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004717- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4718 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4719 as long) arguments.
4720
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004721- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4722 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4723 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4724 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4725 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4726 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4727
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004728- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4729 input.
4730
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004731New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004733
4734Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004736
4737Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004739
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004740- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4741 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4742 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4743
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004744- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4745 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4746 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004747 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4750 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4751 import signal
4752 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004753
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004755 while 1:
4756 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004758 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4759 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4760 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4761 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004762
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004763
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004764What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4765===========================
4766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4768
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004769Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004771
4772- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4773 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4774 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4775
4776- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4777 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4778 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4779 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4780 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4781 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4782 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004783
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004784- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004785 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004786 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4787 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4788 associate a docstring with a property.
4789
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004790- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4791 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4792 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4793 other built-in object types.
4794
4795- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4796 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4797 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4798 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4799 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4800
4801- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4802 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4803
4804- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4805 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004806 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004807 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4808 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4809 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4810 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4811 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4812
4813- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4814 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4815 class.
4816
4817- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4818 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4819 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4820 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4821
4822- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4823 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4824 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4825 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4826
4827- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4828 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4829
4830- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4831 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4832 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4833 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4834 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004835 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004836 with the same value as s.
4837
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004838- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4839
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004840Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004842
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004843- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4844
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004845- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4846 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4847 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4848 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4849 objects.
4850
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004851- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4852 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004853 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4854 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4855
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004856- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4857 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4858 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4859
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004860Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004862
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004863- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4864 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4865 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4866 by the instances.
4867
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004868- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4869 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4870 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4871
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004872- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4873 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4874 before the entire comparison is complete.
4875
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004876- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4877 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4878 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4879
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004880- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4881 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4882 getwriter().
4883
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004884- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4885 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4886
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004887- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004888 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4889 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4890
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004891- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4892 iterable object.
4893
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004894- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4895 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004896
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004897- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4898 authentication.
4899
4900- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4901 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004902
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004903- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004904 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4905 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4906 a sample driver.)
4907
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004908Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004910
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004911- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4912 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4913 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4914 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4915 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4916 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4917 kernel has large file support.
4918
4919- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4920 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4921 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4922 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4923 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4924
4925- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4926 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4927 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4928
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004929C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004931
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004932- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4933 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4934
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004935New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004937
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004938- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4939 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4940
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004941Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004943
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004944- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4945 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4946 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4947 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4948 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4949
4950- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4951 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4952 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4953 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4954
4955- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4956 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4957
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004958Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004960
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004961- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004962 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4963 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004964
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004965
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004966What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4967===========================
4968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4970
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004971Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004973
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004974- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4975 big to represent as a C double.
4976
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004977- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4978 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4979 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4980 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4981 restriction).
4982
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004983- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4984 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4985 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4986 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4987 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4988
4989 >>> dir([])
4990 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4991 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4992 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4993 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4994 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4995 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4996 'reverse', 'sort']
4997
4998 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4999
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005000- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005001 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5002 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5003 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5004 OverflowError exception.
5005
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005006- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005007 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005008 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5009 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5010 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5011 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5012 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005013 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5015 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5016
5017 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5018 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5019 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5020 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005021
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005022- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005023 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5024 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5025 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5026 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5027 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5028 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5029 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5030 once it is created.
5031
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005032- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5033 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5034 (key, value) pairs.
5035
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005036- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005037 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5038 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5039
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005040- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5041 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5042 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5043 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5044 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005045
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005046- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005047 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5048 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5049
5050 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5051
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005052- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005053 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5054
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005055Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005057
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005058- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005059 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5060 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005061
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005062- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5063 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5064 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5065 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5066 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5067 in this area anymore).
5068
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005069- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5070 threading.Timer.
5071
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005072- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5073 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5074
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005075- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005076 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5077
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005078- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005079 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5080 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5081 converted to Python longs.
5082
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005083- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005084 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5085
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005086- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5087 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5088 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5089
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005090Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005092
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005093- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5094 division operators as per PEP 238.
5095
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005096Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005098
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005099- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5100 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5101 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5102 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5103
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005104C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005106
5107- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005108
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005109- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5110 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005111 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5114 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005115 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005117
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005118- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005119 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5120 module:
5121
5122 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005123
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005124 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5125 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005126
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005127 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5128 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005129
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005130 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5131
5132 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5133
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005134- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005135 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5136 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5137 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005138
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005139New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005141
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005142- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5143 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5144 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5145 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5146 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005147
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005148Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005150
5151Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005153
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005154- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5155 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5156 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5157 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005158 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5159 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5160 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5161 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5162 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005163
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005164- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005165 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5166
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005167
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005168What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5169===========================
5170
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5172
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005173Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005175
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005176- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5177 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5178
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005179- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5180 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5181 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005182
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005183- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5184 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5185 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5186 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005187
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005188- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005190- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005191
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005192Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005194
5195- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005196 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005197 the module docstring for details.
5198
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005199Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005201
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005202- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005203 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5204 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5205 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005206
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005207- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5208 Nick Mathewson.
5209
5210Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005212
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005213- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5214 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5215 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5216 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5217 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5218 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5219 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5220 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5221
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005222- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5223 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5224 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5225 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5226
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005227- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5228 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5229 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5230 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5231 come a long way).
5232
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005233- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5234 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5235 write filters for these warnings).
5236
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005237- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5238 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5239 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5240 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5241 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5242
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005243- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5244 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5245 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5246 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5247 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5248 older distribution.
5249
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005250Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005252
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005253- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5254 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005255 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005256
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005257- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5258 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5259 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5260
5261- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5262
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005263- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5264
5265- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5266
5267- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5268
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005269- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005270
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005271- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5272
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005273New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005275
5276C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005278
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005279- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5280 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5281 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5282 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5283 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5284 against buffer overruns.
5285
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005286- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005287 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5288 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005289 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5290 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5291 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5292
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005293- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5294 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5295 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5296 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5297 deprecated.
5298
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005299Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005301
5302- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5303 relevant is found.
5304
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005305
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005306What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005307===========================
5308
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5310
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005311Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005313
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005314- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5315 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5316 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5317 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5318 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5319 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5320 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5321 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005322 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005323 repaired.
5324
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005325- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005326 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005327 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5328 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5329 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5330 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5331 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5332 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5333 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5334 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5335
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005336- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5337 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5338 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5339 leading BMO character).
5340
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005341- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5342 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5343 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5344
5345 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5346 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5347 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005348
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005349 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5350 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5351 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5352 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5353 for various simple to use conversions.
5354
5355 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5356 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5357
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5359 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5360 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5361 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5362 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5363 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5364 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5365 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5366 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5367 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5368 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5369 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5370 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5371 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5372 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005373
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005374- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5375 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5376 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005377 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005378 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005379
5380 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005381 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5382 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5383 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5384 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5385 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005386 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5387 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005388
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005389 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5390 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5391 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005392 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005393
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005394- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5395 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5396 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5397 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5398 floating arithmetic,
5399
5400 x = 9007199254740992.0
5401 print long(x)
5402
5403 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5404 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5405 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5406 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5407 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5408 functions are of good quality).
5409
5410 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5411 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5412 algorithms to break.
5413
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005414- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5415 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5416 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5417 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5418 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5419 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5420 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5421 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5422 order.
5423
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005424- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5425 operation along the most common code paths.
5426
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005427- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5428 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5429
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005430- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5431 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5432 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5433 {}.update(UserDict())
5434
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005435- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5436 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5437 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5438 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5439 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5440 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5441 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5442 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5443
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005444- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005445 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005447 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005448 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5449 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005450 join() method of strings
5451 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005452 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5453 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005455 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005456
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005457- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5458 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5459
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005460- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5461 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5462
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005463- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5464 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5465 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5466 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5467
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005468- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5469 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005470 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005471 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5472 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005473
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005474- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5475
5476
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005477Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005478-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005479
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005480- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005481 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005482 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5483 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5484
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005485- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5486 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5487
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005488- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5489 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5490 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5491 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5492
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005493- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5494 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5495 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5496
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005497- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5498
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005499- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5500
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005501- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5502 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5503 that are still imported into string.py).
5504
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005505- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5506
5507- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5508 Now it does.
5509
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005510- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5511
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005512- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5513 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5514 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5515 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5516 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005517 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5518 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005519
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005520- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5521 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5522 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5523 'help(object)'.
5524
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005525Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005526-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005527
5528- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005529 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005530 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5531 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5532
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005533- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005534 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5535 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005536
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005537C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005538-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005539
5540- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5541 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542
5543----
5544
5545**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**