blob: 5df8246e29b34446934914e10a4f3c6b4db4cd04 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000015- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
16 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
17 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
18 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
19 for a longer write-up of the problem).
20
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000021- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
22 serializing floats.
23
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000024- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
25 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
26 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
27
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000028- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
29 278.
30
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000031- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
32 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
33 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
34 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
35 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
36 PyNumber_*().
37 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
38
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000039- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
40 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
41 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
42 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
43
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000044- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
45 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
46 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
47 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
48 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
49
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000050- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
51 disabled caused a crash.
52
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000053- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
54 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
55
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000056- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
57 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
58
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000059- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
60
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000061- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000062 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
63 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
64 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000065
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000066- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
67
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000068- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
69 returning None.
70
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000071- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
72 ('\') with a specific error message.
73
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000074- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
75
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000076- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
77 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
78
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000079- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000080 an ferror() call.
81
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000082- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
83 list.sort().
84
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000085- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
86 (2+3) --> (5).
87
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000088- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
89
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000090- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
91 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000092
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000093- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
94 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
95 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
96
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000097Extension Modules
98-----------------
99
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000100- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
101
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000102- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
103 if available on the platform.
104
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000105- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
106 available on the platform.
107
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000108- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
109 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
110
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000111- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
112
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000113- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
114 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
115 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
116
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000117- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
118
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000119- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
120 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
121
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000122- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
123 file size.
124
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000125- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
126
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000127- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
128 {remove_history,replace_history}
129
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000130- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
131 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000132
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000133- stat_float_times is now True.
134
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000135- array.array objects are now picklable.
136
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000137- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
138 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
139
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000140- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
141 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
142 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
143
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000144- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
145 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000146
147Library
148-------
149
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000150- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
151 Bug #1224621.
152
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000153- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
154 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
155 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
156 terminates by raising StopIteration.
157
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000158- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
159
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000160- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
161 component of the path.
162
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000163- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
164 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
165 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
166 class at all.
167
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000168- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
169 files to PyPI.
170
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000171- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
172 them to PyPI.
173
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000174- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
175 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
176 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
177 work as expected.
178
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000179- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
180 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
181
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000182- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
183 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
184
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000185- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
186
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000187- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
188 to build.
189
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000190- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
191 symbolic links on Windows.
192
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000193- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
194 profile.py if available.
195
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000196- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
197
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000198- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
199 in LWPCookieJar.
200
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000201- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
202
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000203- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
204
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000205- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
206
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000207- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
208
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000209- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
210
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000211- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
212
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000213- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
214
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000215- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
216
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000217- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
218 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
219 be exploited in various ways.
220
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000221- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
222
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000223- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
224
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000225- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
226
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000227- Enhancements to the csv module:
228
229 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
230 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
231 PEP 305.
232 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
233 reporting.
234 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
235 dictates.
236 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000237 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000238 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000239 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
240 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000241 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
242 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000243 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000244 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
245 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
246 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
247 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
248 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
249 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
250 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
251 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
252 without first creating a dialect class.
253 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
254 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
255 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000256 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000257 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
258 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000259 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
260 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
261 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
262 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000263 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
264 This has been fixed.
265
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000266- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
267 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
268 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
269 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
270
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000271- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
272
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000273- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
274 (Bug #951915).
275
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000276- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
277 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
278 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
279 encoding alias table
280
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000281- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
282
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000283- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
284 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
285
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000286- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
287
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000288- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
289
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000290- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
291
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000292- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
293
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000294- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
295
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000296- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
297 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
298 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
299
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000300- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000301 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000302
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000303- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
304 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
305 tokenizer with very long source lines.
306
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000307- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
308 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
309
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000310- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
311 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000312
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000313- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
314 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
315
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000316- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
317 correctly.
318
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000319- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
320 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
321 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
322 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
323 between two lines.
324
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000325
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000326Build
327-----
328
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000329- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
330 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
331 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000332 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000333
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000334- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
335 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
336 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
337
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000338- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
339
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000340- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
341 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
342
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000343- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
344 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
345 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
346 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
347 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
348 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
349 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
350 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
351
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000352- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
353 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
354 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
355 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
356
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000357
358C API
359-----
360
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000361- Removed PyRange_New().
362
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000363
364Tests
365-----
366
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000367- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000368
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000369
370Documentation
371-------------
372
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000373- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
374 Closes bug #1166582.
375
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000376- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
377 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
378 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
379
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000380Mac
381---
382
383
384
385Tools/Demos
386-----------
387
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000388- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000389
390
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000391What's New in Python 2.4 final?
392===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000393
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000394*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000395
396Core and builtins
397-----------------
398
399- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
400 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
401 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
402
403
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000404What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
405==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000406
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000407*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000408
409Core and builtins
410-----------------
411
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000412- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
413 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
414 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
415
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000416
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000417Library
418-------
419
420- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
421 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
422 raised is re-raised.
423
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000424- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
425 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
426
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000427- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
428 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
429 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
430 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
431 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
432 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
433 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
434 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
435 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
436 by the slice are recomputed now.
437
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000438- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000439
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000440Build
441-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000442
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000443- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
444 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
445 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000446
447C API
448-----
449
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000450- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
451
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000452
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000453What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
454================================
455
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000456*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000457
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000458License
459-------
460
461The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
462is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
463changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
464Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
465intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
466durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
467the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
468License::
469
470 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
471
472says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
473to Python 2.1.1.
474
475The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
476License Version 2.
477
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000478Core and builtins
479-----------------
480
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000481- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
482 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
483 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
484 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
485 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
486 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
487 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
488 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
489 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
490 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
491
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000492- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000493
494Extension Modules
495-----------------
496
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000497- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
498 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
499 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
500 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000501
502Library
503-------
504
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000505- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
506 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
507 returned.
508
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000509- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
510
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000511- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
512 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
513
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000514- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
515
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000516- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
517 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000518
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000519- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
520
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000521- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
522
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000523- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000524 the source code is updated and reloaded.
525
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000526Build
527-----
528
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000529- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000530
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000531What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
532================================
533
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000534*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000535
536Core and builtins
537-----------------
538
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000539- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000540 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
541
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000542- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
543 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
544 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
545 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
546
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000547- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
548 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
549
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000550- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
551 constant.
552
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000553- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
554 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
555 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
556 large), and to anomalies such as
557 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
558 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
559 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
560 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000561
562Extension modules
563-----------------
564
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000565- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
566 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000567 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
568 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
569 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000570
571Library
572-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000573
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000574- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000575 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000576 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
577 --swig-cpp.
578
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000579- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
580 it is set.
581
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000582- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000583
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000584- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
585 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
586 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
587 Closes bug #1039270.
588
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000589- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000590
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000591 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000592 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
593 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
594 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
595 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
596 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
597 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
598 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
599 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
600 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
601 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
602 + Updates to documentation.
603
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000604- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
605 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
606 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
607 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
608
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000609- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000610
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000611- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
612 applications should use the getmember function.
613
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000614- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
615
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000616- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
617 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
618 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
619 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
620 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
621 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
622 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
623 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
624 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
625
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000626- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
627 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000628 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000629
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000630- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
631 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
632 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
633 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
634 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
635 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
636 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
637 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000638
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000639- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
640 the new public features (of which there are many).
641
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000642- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000643 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
644 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
645 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
646 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000647 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000648
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000649- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
650
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000651- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
652 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
653 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
654 options.
655
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000656- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
657 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
658 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
659 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
660 conditions under which non-string values work.
661
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000662Build
663-----
664
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000665- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
666 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
667 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
668
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000669- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
670 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
671 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
672 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
673 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000674
675C API
676-----
677
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000678- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
679 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
680
681- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
682
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000683- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
684 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
685 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
686 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
687 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
688 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
689 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
690 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
691 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
692
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000693- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
694
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000695- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
696 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
697 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000698
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000699Tests
700-----
701
702- test__locale ported to unittest
703
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000704Mac
705---
706
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000707- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
708 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
709 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000710
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000711Tools/Demos
712-----------
713
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000714- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
715 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
716 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
717 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
718 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000719
720
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000721What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
722=================================
723
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000724*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000725
726Core and builtins
727-----------------
728
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000729- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000730 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
731
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000732- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
733 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
734 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
735 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
736 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
737 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
738 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
739 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000740 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
741 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
742 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
743 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
744 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000745
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000746- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
747 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
748 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
749 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
750 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
751
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000752- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
753
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000754- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
755 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
756
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000757- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
758 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
759 modified the list.
760
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000761- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
762 functions is now writable.
763
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000764- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
765 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
766 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
767 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
768
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000769- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
770 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
771 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
772 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
773 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000774
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000775- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
776 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
777
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000778Extension modules
779-----------------
780
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000781- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
782
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000783- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
784 data.
785
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000786- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
787 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
788 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
789 supposed to have been truncated away.
790
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000791- Added socket.socketpair().
792
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000793- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
794 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
795
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000796- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000797 versions of Python, have now been removed.
798
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000799Library
800-------
801
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000802- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000803 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000804
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000805- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
806 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
807
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000808- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
809 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
810
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000811- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
812
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000813- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
814 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000815
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000816- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
817 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
818
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000819- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
820
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000821- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
822
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000823- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
824
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000825- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
826 Percivall.
827
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000828- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
829 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
830
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000831- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
832 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
833 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000834 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000835
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000836- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
837 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
838 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
839 and exponent.
840
841- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
842
843- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
844 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
845 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
846
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000847- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
848 to the readline module.
849
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000850- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000851 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
852 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000853
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000854- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
855 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
856 contains symlinks.
857
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000858- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
859 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
860
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000861- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
862 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
863 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
864
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000865- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
866 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
867 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
868 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
869 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
870 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
871 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
872 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
873 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
874 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
875 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
876 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
877 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
878
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000879- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
880
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000881Tools/Demos
882-----------
883
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000884- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
885 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
886
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000887- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
888
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000889Build
890-----
891
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000892- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
893 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
894 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
895 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
896 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
897 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
898 plans to do so.
899
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000900- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
901 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
902
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000903- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
904 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
905
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000906- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
907 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
908
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000909- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
910 GNU/k*BSD systems.
911
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000912- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
913 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
914
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000915C API
916-----
917
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000918..
919
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000920Documentation
921-------------
922
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000923- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
924 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
925
926- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
927 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
928 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000929
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000930New platforms
931-------------
932
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000933- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
934
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000935Tests
936-----
937
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000938..
939
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000940Windows
941-------
942
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000943- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
944 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
945 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
946 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
947 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
948 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
949 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
950 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
951 the problem.
952
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000953Mac
954---
955
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000956..
957
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000958
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000959What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
960=================================
961
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000962*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000963
964Core and builtins
965-----------------
966
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000967- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
968 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
969 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
970 sensitive code.
971
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000972- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000973 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000974
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000975 @staticmethod
976 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000977
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000978 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000979
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000980- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
981 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
982 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
983 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
984 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
985 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
986 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
987 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
988 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
989 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
990 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
991
992 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
993 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
994 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
995 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
996 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
997 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
998 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
999
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001000- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1001 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1002
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001003- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001004 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001005
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001006- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001007 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001008 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1009
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001010- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001011 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1012 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1013
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001014- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1015 types that support garbage collection.
1016
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001017- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1018
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001019- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1020 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1021 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1022 Jython.
1023
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001024- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1025
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001026- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1027 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1028
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001029- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1030 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1031 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001032
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001033- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1034 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1035 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1036
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001037Extension modules
1038-----------------
1039
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001040- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1041
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001042Library
1043-------
1044
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001045- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1046 TIS-620
1047
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001048- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1049 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1050 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1051 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1052 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1053 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1054 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1055 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1056 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1057 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1058
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001059- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1060
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001061- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1062 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1063 same as when the argument is omitted).
1064 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1065
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001066- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1067
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001068- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1069 schemes are offered.
1070
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001071- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1072
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001073- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1074 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1075 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1076
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001077- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1078
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001079- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1080 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1081
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001082- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1083 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1084 when dummy_threading is being used.
1085
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001086- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1087 from a tarfile.
1088
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001089- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001090 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001091
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001092- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1093 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1094 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1095 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1096
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001097- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1098 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1099
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001100- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1101 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1102 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1103 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1104 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1105 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1106 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1107 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1108 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1109 by some other method in progress).
1110
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001111- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1112 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1113 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001114
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001115- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1116
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001117- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1118 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1119 AM Kuchling.
1120
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001121- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1122 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1123 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1124
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001125- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1126 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1127 instead of unsigned.
1128
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001129- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001130 no longer part of the public API.
1131
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001132- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1133 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1134 string methods of the same name).
1135
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001136- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001137 SF patch 945642.
1138
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001139- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1140
1141 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1142
1143 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1144 DocTestSuites.
1145
1146- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1147 that provide thread-local data.
1148
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001149- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1150 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1151
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001152- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1153
1154- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1155 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1156 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1157
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001158- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1159
1160 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1161 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1162 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001163
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001164 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1165 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1166 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1167 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1168
1169 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1170 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1171
1172 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1173 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1174 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1175 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1176
1177 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1178 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1179 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1180 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1181 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1182
1183 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1184 wrapping help output.
1185
1186 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1187 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1188 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001189
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001190C API
1191-----
1192
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001193- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1194 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1195 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1196 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1197 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1198 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1199 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1200 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1201 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1202 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1203 its visible semantics have not changed.
1204
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001205- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1206 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1207
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001208Documentation
1209-------------
1210
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001211- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001212
1213 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001214 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001215
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001216 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001217
1218 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1219
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001220- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001221
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001222Tests
1223-----
1224
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001225- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001226 platforms that use the Makefile.
1227
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001228- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1229 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1230 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1231
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001232
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001233What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1234=================================
1235
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001236*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001237
1238Core and builtins
1239-----------------
1240
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001241- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1242 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1243 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1244 objects now (one object instead of three).
1245
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001246- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1247 Windows DLLs.
1248
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001249- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1250 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001251
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001252- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1253 a new .pyc magic.
1254
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001255- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1256 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1257 be there.
1258
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001259- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1260 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1261 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1262
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001263- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1264 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1265 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1266
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001267- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1268
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001269- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1270 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1271 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001272
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001273- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1274 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1275
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001276- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1277
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001278- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001279 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001280
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001281- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1282
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001283- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1284
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001285- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1286 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1287
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001288- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1289 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1290 Fixes bug #858016 .
1291
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001292- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1293 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1294 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1295
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001296- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1297 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1298 improves their performance (about 35%).
1299
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001300- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1301 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1302 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1303
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001304- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1305 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1306 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1307 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1308
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001309- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1310 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001311 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001312 length is not known).
1313
1314- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1315 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001316 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1317 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001318 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1319
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001320- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1321 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1322
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001323- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1324 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1325 keyword arguments.
1326
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001327- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1328 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1329 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1330
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001331- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1332 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1333 cases.
1334
1335- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1336 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1337 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1338 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1339 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1340 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1341 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1342 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1343 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1344 a release build.
1345
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001346- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1347 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1348
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001349- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001350 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001351
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001352- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1353 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1354 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1355 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1356 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1357 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1358 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1359 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1360 destroyed.
1361
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001362- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1363 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1364 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1365 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1366 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1367 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1368 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1369 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1370
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001371- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1372 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1373 character other than a space.
1374
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001375- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1376 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1377 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1378 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1379 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1380 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1381 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1382 attributes with the same name.
1383
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001384- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1385 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1386 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1387 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1388 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1389 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1390 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1391 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1392 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1393 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1394 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1395 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1396 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1397 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001398
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001399- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1400 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1401 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1402 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1403 This has been repaired.
1404
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001405- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1406
1407- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1408
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001409- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1410 over a sequence.
1411
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001412- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001413 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001414
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001415- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1416
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001417- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1418 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1419 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1420 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1421 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1422 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1423 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1424 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1425
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001426- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1427 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1428 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1429
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001430- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1431 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1432 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1433 freelist.
1434
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001435- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1436 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1437
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001438- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1439 number.
1440
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001441- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1442 a TypeError exception.
1443
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001444- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1445 820195.
1446
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001447- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1448 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1449 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1450
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001451- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001452 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1453 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001454
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001455- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1456 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1457 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1458
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001459- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1460 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001461 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001462
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001463- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001464 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1465 the first call.
1466
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001467
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001468Extension modules
1469-----------------
1470
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001471- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1472 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1473
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001474- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1475 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1476 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1477 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1478 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1479 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1480 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001481
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001482- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1483
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001484- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1485
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001486- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1487 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1488
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001489- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1490 fewer false positives.
1491
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001492- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1493 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1494
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001495- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001496 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1497
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001498- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001499 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001500 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001501 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1502 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001503
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001504- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1505 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1506 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1507 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1508
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001509- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1510 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1511 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1512 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1513 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1514 #897625.
1515
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001516- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1517 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1518
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001519- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1520 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1521 and pops on either side of the deque.
1522
1523- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1524 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1525
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001526- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1527 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1528 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1529 other functions that expect a function argument.
1530
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001531- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1532
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001533- os.getsid was added.
1534
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001535- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1536 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1537 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1538
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001539- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1540
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001541- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1542
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001543- readline.clear_history was added.
1544
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001545- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1546
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001547- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1548
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001549- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1550
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001551- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1552
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001553- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1554
1555- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1556
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001557- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1558
1559- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1560
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001561- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1562 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1563 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1564
1565- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1566 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1567 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1568 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1569 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1570 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1571 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1572
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001573- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1574 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1575 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1576 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001577
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001578- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001579 iterators from a single iterable.
1580
1581- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1582 of raising a TypeError exception.
1583
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001584- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1585 as parameter.
1586
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001587Library
1588-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001589
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001590- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1591 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1592 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001593
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001594- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1595 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1596 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001597
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001598- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001599
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001600- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1601 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001602
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001603- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1604 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1605
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001606- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1607
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001608- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001609 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001610
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001611- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001612 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001613
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001614- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1615
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001616- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1617 on cygwin and mingw32.
1618
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001619- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1620
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001621- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1622 module.
1623
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001624- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1625 installation scheme for all platforms.
1626
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001627- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001628 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001629
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001630- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1631 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1632 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1633
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001634- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1635 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1636 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1637
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001638- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1639
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001640- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1641
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001642- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1643 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1644
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001645- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1646 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1647 type pattern with the same value exists.
1648
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001649- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1650 when run from the command prompt).
1651
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001652- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1653 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1654
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001655- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1656 default sort).
1657
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001658- Added global runctx function to profile module
1659
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001660- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1661
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001662- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1663
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001664- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1665
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001666- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001667 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1668 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1669 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1670 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1671 accordingly.
1672
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001673- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1674 decoding standards.
1675
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001676- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1677 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1678 called for all requests.
1679
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001680- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1681 they are passed to the compiler.
1682
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001683- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1684 indent, width and depth.
1685
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001686- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1687 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1688
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001689- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1690 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1691
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001692- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1693
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001694- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1695
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001696- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1697
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001698- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1699 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1700
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001701- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001702 for better performance.
1703
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001704- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001705
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001706- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1707 a string).
1708
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001709- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1710
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001711- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1712
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001713- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1714
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001715- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1716
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001717- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1718 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1719 list of fieldnames.
1720
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001721- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1722 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1723
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001724- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1725
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001726- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1727 empty lists.
1728
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001729- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1730 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1731 and shelves.
1732
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001733- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1734 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1735
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001736- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001737 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1738 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001739
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001740- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1741 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001742 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001743
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001744- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001745 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1746 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1747
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001748- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1749 and removed in Py2.4.
1750
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001751- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1752
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001753- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1754
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001755Tools/Demos
1756-----------
1757
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001758- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1759 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1760
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001761- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1762
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001763- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1764 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1765 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1766 destination in situations where both files are given.
1767
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001768- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1769 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1770 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1771 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1772
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001773- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1774
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001775- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1776 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1777 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1778 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1779 now.
1780
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001781- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1782 in effect
1783
1784- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1785 C-c C-h
1786
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001787- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1788 -d option was given.
1789
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001790Build
1791-----
1792
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001793- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1794 build under OS X.
1795
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001796- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1797 --enable-profiling.
1798
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001799- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1800 is configured --with-tsc.
1801
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001802- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1803 on AMD64.
1804
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001805- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1806 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1807
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001808- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1809 removed.
1810
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001811- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1812 supported (see PEP 11).
1813
1814- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1815
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001816- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1817
1818- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1819 (see PEP 11).
1820
1821- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1822 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1823
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001824C API
1825-----
1826
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001827- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1828 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1829 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1830
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001831- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1832 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1833 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1834 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1835
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001836- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1837 generator objects.
1838
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001839- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1840 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001841 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1842 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001843
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001844- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1845 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1846
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001847- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1848 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1849 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1850 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1851 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1852
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001853- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1854 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1855 about 10% faster.
1856
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001857- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1858 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1859
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001860- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1861 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1862 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1863 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1864
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001865Windows
1866-------
1867
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001868- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1869 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1870 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1871 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1872
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001873- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1874 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1875 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1876
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001877
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001878What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1879===============================
1880
1881*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1882
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001883IDLE
1884----
1885
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001886- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1887 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1888 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1889 context-menu actions.
1890
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001891- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1892 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1893 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1894 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1895 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1896 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1897 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1898 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1899 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1900
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001901
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001902What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1903=============================================
1904
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001905*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001906
1907Core and builtins
1908-----------------
1909
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001910- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001911 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001912 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1913
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001914Extension modules
1915-----------------
1916
1917- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1918 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1919 than once. This has been fixed.
1920
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001921- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1922 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1923 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1924 call.
1925
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001926- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1927
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001928Library
1929-------
1930
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001931- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1932 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1933
1934- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1935 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1936 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1937 restored.
1938
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001939IDLE
1940----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001941
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001942- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001943
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001944Build
1945-----
1946
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001947- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1948 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1949
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001950C API
1951-----
1952
1953Windows
1954-------
1955
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001956- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1957 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1958
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001959- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1960
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001961Mac
1962---
1963
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001964- Various fixes to pimp.
1965
1966- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1967
1968- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1969 more problems than it solves.
1970
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001971
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001972What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1973=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001974
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001975*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1976
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001977Core and builtins
1978-----------------
1979
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001980- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1981 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1982
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001983- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1984 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001985 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001986
1987- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1988 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1989 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001990 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001991
1992- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1993 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001994
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001995- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1996 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1997 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1998
1999- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002000 770247.
2001
2002- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002003
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002004Extension modules
2005-----------------
2006
2007- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2008 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2009
2010- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2011
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002012- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2013
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002014- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2015 contained within the _strptime module.
2016
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002017- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2018 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2019
2020- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002021 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2022
2023- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2024 the find_class attribute, if present.
2025
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002026- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002027
2028 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2029 (SF bug 763298).
2030
2031 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002032 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2033 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2034 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002035
2036 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2037
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002038Library
2039-------
2040
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002041- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2042
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002043- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2044 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2045 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2046 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2047 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2048 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2049 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2050 or Tester().
2051
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002052- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2053 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2054 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2055 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2056 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2057 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2058 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2059 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2060 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002061
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002062 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002063
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002064- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2065 weren't before was an oversight.
2066
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002067- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2068 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2069
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002070- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2071 when there are no lines.
2072
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002073- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2074 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2075
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002076- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2077 to child processes.
2078
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002079- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2080
2081- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2082
2083- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2084 xmlrpclib.
2085
2086- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2087 responses.
2088
2089- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2090 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2091
2092- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2093 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2094 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2095
2096- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2097 used as patterns.
2098
2099- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2100 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2101 than Tk 8.3.
2102
2103- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2104
2105- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002106
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002107Tools/Demos
2108-----------
2109
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002110- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2111
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002112- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2113
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002115
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002116Build
2117-----
2118
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002119- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2120
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002121- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2122
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002123- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2124 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002125
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002126- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2127 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2128 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002129
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002130C API
2131-----
2132
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002133- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2134 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2135
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002136Windows
2137-------
2138
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002139- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2140 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2141 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2142 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2143 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2144 Python exception ::
2145
2146 thread.error: can't start new thread
2147
2148 is raised now.
2149
2150- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2151 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2152 instead of from DLL teardown.
2153
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002154Mac
2155---
2156
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002157- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002158 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002159 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2160 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2161 the executable in the bundle.
2162
2163- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002164
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002165- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2166
2167- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2168 on Panther.
2169
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002170What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2171================================
2172
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002173*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002174
2175Core and builtins
2176-----------------
2177
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002178- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2179 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2180 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2181 with the -i option.
2182
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002183- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2184 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2185
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002186- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2187 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2188
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002189- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2190 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2191 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2192 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2193 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2194 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2195 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2196 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2197 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2198 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2199 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2200 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2201 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002202
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002203- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2204 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2205 embedded in a lambda expression.
2206
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002207- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2208 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2209 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2210 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2211 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2212
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002213- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2214 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2215 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2216
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002217- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2218 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2219
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002220- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2221 It's writable again.
2222
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002223- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2224 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2225 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002226 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002227
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002228- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2229 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2230 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2231
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002232Extension modules
2233-----------------
2234
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002235- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2236 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2237
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002238- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2239 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2240 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2241 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2242
2243- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2244 collection.
2245
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002246- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2247 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2248 unique within a single program run.
2249
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002250- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2251 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2252
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002253- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2254 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2255
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002256- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2257 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002258
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002259- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2260
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002261- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2262 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2263
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002264- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2265 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2266 for many BSD-derived systems.
2267
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002268
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002269Library
2270-------
2271
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002272- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2273 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2274 primary ones:
2275
2276 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2277 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2278 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2279
2280 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2281 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2282 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2283 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2284 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2285 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2286
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002287- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2288 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2289 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2290 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2291 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2292 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2293 argument.
2294
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002295- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2296 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2297 in the archive.
2298
2299- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2300 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2301
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002302- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2303 569574).
2304
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002305- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2306 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2307 no more.
2308
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002309- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2310 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2311 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2312 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2313 code coverage.
2314
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002315- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2316 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2317 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002318 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2319 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002320
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002321- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2322 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2323 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002324 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002325
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002326- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2327
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002328- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2329 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2330 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2331 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2332
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002333- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2334 handling.
2335
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002336- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2337 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2338
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002339- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2340 in socket.py.
2341
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002342- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2343
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002344- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2345 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2346 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2347 opener with proxy support.
2348
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002349- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2350
2351- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2352
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002353Tools/Demos
2354-----------
2355
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002356- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2357
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002358- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2359
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002360- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2361 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002362
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002363- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2364 files.
2365
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002366Build
2367-----
2368
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002369- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002370 different root directory.
2371
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002372C API
2373-----
2374
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002375- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2376 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2377 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2378 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2379 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2380 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2381 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2382 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2383 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2384 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2385
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002386- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2387 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2388 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2389 from Python.
2390
2391
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002392New platforms
2393-------------
2394
2395None this time.
2396
2397Tests
2398-----
2399
2400- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2401 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2402
2403Windows
2404-------
2405
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002406- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2407
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002408- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2409 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2410 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2411 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2412 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2413 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2414 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2415 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2416 that's what it's for.
2417
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002418Mac
2419---
2420
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002421- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2422 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2423 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2424 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002425- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2426 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2427- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002428
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002429SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2430------------------------------------
2431
2432430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2433598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2434622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2435661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2436683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2437697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2438713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2439724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2440727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2441729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2442730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2443731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2444732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2445733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2446735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2447740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2448744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2449745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2450747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2451749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2452751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2453753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2454755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2455757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2456760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2457
2458
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002459What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2460================================
2461
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002462*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002463
2464Core and builtins
2465-----------------
2466
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002467- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2468 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2469
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002470- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2471 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2472 and cannot be strings).
2473
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002474- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2475 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2476 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2477 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2478
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002479- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2480 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2481 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2482 Python itself.
2483
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002484- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2485 the referenced object, if it has one.
2486
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002487- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2488 the thread started at
2489 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2490
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002491- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2492 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2493 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2494 placed on a list index.
2495
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002496- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2497 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2498 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2499 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2500
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002501- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2502 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2503 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2504 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2505 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2506 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2507 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2508
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002509- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2510 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2511 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2512 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2513 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2514
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002515- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2516 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002517
2518- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2519 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2520 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2521 #693195.)
2522
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002523- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2524 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002525
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002526- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002527 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002528 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2529 interpreter executions, would fail.
2530
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002531- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002532 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002533 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002534
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002535Extension modules
2536-----------------
2537
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002538- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2539 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2540 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2541 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2542
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002543- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2544 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2545
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002546- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2547 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2548 and Greg Chapman.)
2549
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002550- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2551 recursively.
2552
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002553- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002554 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2555 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2556 leaks.
2557
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002558- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2559
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002560- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2561 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2562 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2563 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2564 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2565 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2566 #705836.
2567
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002568- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002569 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2570
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002571- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2572 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2573 See SF bug #692416.
2574
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002575- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2576 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2577
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002578- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2579 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2580 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002581
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002582- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002583 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2584 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2585
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002586- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2587 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2588 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2589 timeouts to work properly.
2590
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002591Library
2592-------
2593
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002594- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2595 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2596 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2597 future release.
2598
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002599- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2600 for querying platform dependent features.
2601
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002602- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002603
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002604- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2605 pickle protocol versions.
2606
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002607- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2608 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2609 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2610
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002611- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2612
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002613- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2614 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2615 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2616 modules.
2617
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002618- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2619 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2620 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2621
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002622- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2623 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2624
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002625- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2626 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2627 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2628
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002629- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002630 MS Office extensions.
2631
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002632- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2633 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2634
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002635- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2636 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2637
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002638- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2639 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2640 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2641 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2642 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2643 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2644
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002645- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2646 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2647 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002648
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002649- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2650 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2651 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2652
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002653- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2654
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002655- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2656 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2657 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2658
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002659Tools/Demos
2660-----------
2661
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002662- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2663 See the module docstring for details.
2664
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002665Build
2666-----
2667
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002668- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2669 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002670
2671C API
2672-----
2673
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002674- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2675
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002676- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2677 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2678 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2679
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002680- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2681 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002682
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002683 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2684 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2685 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002686
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002687- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002688 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2689
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002690- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2691 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2692 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002693
2694New platforms
2695-------------
2696
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002697None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002698
2699Tests
2700-----
2701
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002702- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2703 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002704
2705Windows
2706-------
2707
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002708- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2709 function.
2710
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002711- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2712 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002713
2714Mac
2715---
2716
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002717- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2718 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002719
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002720- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2721 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002722
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002723- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2724 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2725 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002726
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002727- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002728 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2729 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002730
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002731- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2732 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002733
2734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002735What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2736=================================
2737
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002738*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002739
2740Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002741-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002742
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002743- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2744 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2745 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2746
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002747- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2748 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2749 (SF patch #664376.)
2750
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002751- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2752 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2753 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2754 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2755 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2756 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002757 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002758
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002759- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2760 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2761 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2762 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002763 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002764
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002765- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2766 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2767 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2768 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2769 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2770 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2771 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2772 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2773 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2774 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2775 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2776
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002777- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2778 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2779 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2780 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2781 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2782 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2783
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002784- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2785 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2786
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002787- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2788 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2789 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2790 case.)
2791
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002792- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2793 passed as unicode strings.
2794
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002795- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2796 See SF bug #683467.
2797
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002798- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2799 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2800
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002801- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2802
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002803- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2804
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002805- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2806 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2807 arguments.
2808
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002809- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2810 See SF bug #667147.
2811
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002812- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002813 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002814 See SF bug #676155.
2815
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002816- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002817 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002818 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2819 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2820 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2821 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2822 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2823 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002824
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002825Extension modules
2826-----------------
2827
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002828- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2829 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2830 tp_as_number pointer.
2831
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002832- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2833 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2834 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2835 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2836 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2837
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002838- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2839
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002840- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2841
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002842- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002843 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002844 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2845 patch #678531.)
2846
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002847- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2848 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2849
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002850- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2851 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2852
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002853- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2854
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002855- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2856 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2857 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002859- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2860
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002861- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2862 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2863
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002864- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002865
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002866- datetime changes:
2867
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002868 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2869
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002870 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2871 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2872 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2873 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2874 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2875 now.
2876
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002877 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002878 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2879 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002880
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002881 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002882 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002883 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2884 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2885 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2886 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002887
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002888 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2889 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2890 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002891 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2892
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002893 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2894 by a later example coded by Guido.
2895
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002896 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002897 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2898 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2899 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002900 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2901 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2902
2903 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2904 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2905 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2906 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2907 tzinfo subclass instance.
2908
2909 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2910 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2911 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2912 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2913 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2914 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2915 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2916 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002917
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002918 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2919 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2920 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2921 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2922 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002923 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2924
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002925 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002926
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002927 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2928 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2929 as a naive datetime object.
2930
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002931 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2932 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2933 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2934
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002935 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2936 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2937 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2938 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2939 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2940 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2941 comparison.
2942
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002943 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2944 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2945 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2946 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002947 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002948
2949 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002950
2951 and ::
2952
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002953 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2954
2955 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2956 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2957 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2958 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2959
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002960 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2961 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2962 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2963 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2964 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2965
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002966 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2967 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002968 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2969 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002970
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002971Library
2972-------
2973
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002974- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2975 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2976
2977- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2978 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2979 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2980 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2981 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2982 See PEP 307 for details.
2983
2984- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2985 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2986
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002987- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2988 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002989 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002990 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2991 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002992 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002993
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002994- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2995 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2996
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002997- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2998 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2999 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3000
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003001- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3002
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003003- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3004 exception.
3005
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003006- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3007 class.
3008
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003009- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3010 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3011 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3012
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003013- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3014 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3015
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003016- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003017 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3018 See SF bug #659228.
3019
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003020- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3021 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3022 See SF patch #651082.
3023
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003024- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003025
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003026- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3027 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3028
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003029- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003030 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003031
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003032- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3033 DOS paths from other platforms.
3034
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003035Tools/Demos
3036-----------
3037
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003038- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3039 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3040 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3041 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3042 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3043 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3044 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3045 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3046 example:
3047
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003048 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3049 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003050
3051 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3052
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003053
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003054Build
3055-----
3056
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003057- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3058 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3059 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003060 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3061
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003062 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3063
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003064- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3065 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3066 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3067 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3068 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3069 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3070 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3071 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3072 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3073
3074- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3075 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3076 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3077 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3078
3079- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3080 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3081
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003082C API
3083-----
3084
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003085- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3086 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003087
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003088- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3089 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3090 tp_as_number pointer.
3091
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003092- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3093 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3094 (SF #681367)
3095
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003096- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3097 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3098 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3099 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003100
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003101Tests
3102-----
3103
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003104- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003105 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3106 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3107 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3108 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3109 pydoc.)
3110
3111- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3112
3113- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003114
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003115Windows
3116-------
3117
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003118- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3119 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3120 time).
3121
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003122- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3123 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3124
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003125- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3126 release without strong cryptography.
3127
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003128- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003129 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003130
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003131- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3132 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3133
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003134Mac
3135---
3136
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003137- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3138 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003139
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003140- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3141 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3142 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003143
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003144- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3145 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003146
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003147- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3148 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3149 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3150 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003151
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003152- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003153 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3154 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3155 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003156
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003157
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003158What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003159=================================
3160
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003161*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003163Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003165
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003166- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3167
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003168- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3169 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003170 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003171 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003172 a different meaning than before.
3173
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003174- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003175 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003176 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003177
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003178- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003179 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003180 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003181
3182- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3183 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3184 and deallocation.
3185
3186- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3187 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3188
3189- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3190 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3191 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3192 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3193 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3194
3195- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3196 now detected by the garbage collector.
3197
3198- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3199 [SF bug 519621]
3200
3201- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3202 identifier.
3203
3204- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3205 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3206 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3207 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3208 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3209 [SF bug 563060]
3210
3211- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3212 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3213 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3214 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3215 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3216
3217- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3218 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3219 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3220
3221- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3222
3223- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3224 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3225 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3226 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3227 state of the slots would be lost.)
3228
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003229Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003231
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003232- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003233 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3234 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3235 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3236 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003237 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3238 Jython 2.1.
3239
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003240- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003241 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003242 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3243 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3244 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3245 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3246 these, see PEP 302.
3247
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003248- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3249 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3250 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3251
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003252- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3253 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3254 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3255
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003256- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3257 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3258 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3259
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003260- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3261 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3262 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3263 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3264 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3265 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3266 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3267 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3268 releases or implementations.
3269
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003270- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003271 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3272 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003273
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003274- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3275 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3276
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003277- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3278 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3279 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3280
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003281- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3282 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3283
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003284- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3285 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003286 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3287 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003288
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003289- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3290 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3291 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3292 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3293 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3294
3295 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3296 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3297 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3298 pattern.
3299
3300 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3301 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3302 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3303 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3304
3305 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3306 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3307 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3308 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3309 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3310 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3311
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003312- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3313 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3314 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3315 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3316 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3317 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3318 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3319 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003320
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003321- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3322 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3323 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3324 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3325 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003326 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3327 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3328 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3329 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3330 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3331 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3332 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003333
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003334- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3335 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3336
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003337- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3338 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3339 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3340 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3341 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3342 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3343 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3344 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3345 to Zack Weinberg!
3346
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003347- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3348 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3349 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3350 type. This has been fixed now.
3351
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003352- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3353 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3354 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3355
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003356- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3357 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3358 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3359 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3360 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3361 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3362 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3363 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003364 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003365
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003366- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3367 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3368 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003369
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003370- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3371 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3372 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3373 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3374 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3375 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3376 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3377 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003378 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003379 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3380 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3381
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003382- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3383 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3384 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3385 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3386 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3387 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3388 this.)
3389
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003390- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3391 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003392 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003393 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003394 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3395 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003396 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3397 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003398
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003399- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3400 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3401 currently running.
3402
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003403- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3404 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3405 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3406 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3407
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003408- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3409 as directory names.
3410
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003411- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3412 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3413
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003414- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3415 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3416
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003417- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003418 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3419 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003420
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003421- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3422 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3423 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3424 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3425 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3426
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003427- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3428 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3429 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3430 removed.
3431
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003432- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3433 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3434 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3435
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003436- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3437 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3438 to __debug__.
3439
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003440- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3441 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3442 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3443
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003444- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3445 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3446 deprecated now.
3447
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003448- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3449 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3450 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003451
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003452- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3453 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3454 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3455 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3456 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003457
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003458- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3459 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3460
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003461- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3462 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3463 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003464 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003465 is backward compatible.
3466
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003467- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3468 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3469 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3470 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3471 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3472
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003473- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3474 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3475 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3476 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3477 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3478 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003479
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003480- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3481 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3482
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003483- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3484 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3485
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003486- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3487 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3488 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3489 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3490 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3491
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003492- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3493 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3494 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3495
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003496- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003497 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3498
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003499- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3500 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3501 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003502
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003503- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3504 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3505
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003506- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3507 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3508 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3509
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003510- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3511
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003512Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003514
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003515- Added three operators to the operator module:
3516 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3517 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3518 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3519
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003520- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3521
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003522- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3523 archives.
3524
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003525- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3526 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3527 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3528
3529 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3530
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003531- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3532 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3533 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003534 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003535
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003536- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3537 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3538 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3539 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003540 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3541 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3542 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3543 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003544
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003545- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3546 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003547
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003548- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3549
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003550- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3551 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3552
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003553- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3554 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3555 supported.
3556
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003557- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3558
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003559- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3560 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003561
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003562- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3563 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3564
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003565- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3566
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003567- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3568 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3569
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003570- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3571 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3572 functions but callable type objects.
3573
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003574- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003575 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003576 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003577
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003578- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3579 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003580
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003581- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3582 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003583
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003584- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3585 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3586 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3587 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3588
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003589- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3590 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003591
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003592- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3593 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3594 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3595 and __imul__.
3596
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003597- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003598 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3599 is called.
3600
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003601- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3602 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3603 interpreter was compiled.
3604
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003605- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3606 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3607 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003608 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003609 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3610 1, not 2.
3611
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003612- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3613 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3614 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3615 limit.
3616
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003617- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3618 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3619 bug #623464.
3620
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003621- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3622 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3623 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3624 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003628
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003629- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3630
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003631- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3632 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3633 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3634 with Python 2.3a2.
3635
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003636- os.path exposes getctime.
3637
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003638- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003639 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003640 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003641 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003642 unit tests of floating point results.
3643
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003644- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3645 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3646 has been increased.
3647
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003648- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3649 executed.
3650
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003651- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3652 postinstallation script.
3653
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003654- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3655 test the current module.
3656
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003657- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003658 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3659 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3660 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3661 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3662
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003663- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003664 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003665 Ward's Optik package.
3666
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003667- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3668 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3669 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3670 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3671
3672- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3673 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003674 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003675
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003676- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3677 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3678 shelf are binary pickles.
3679
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003680- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3681 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3682
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003683- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3684 modules are iterators now.
3685
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003686- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3687 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3688 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3689 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3690 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3691 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003692
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003693- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3694 with their entity value.
3695
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003696- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3697
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003698- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3699 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003700
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003701- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3702 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003703 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003704
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003705- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3706 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3707 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3708 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3709 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3710 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3711 main():
3712
3713 import locale
3714 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3715
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003716- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3717 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3718
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003719- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3720 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3721 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3722 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3723 to the new standard.
3724
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003725- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3726 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3727 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3728 an extension to the database.
3729
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003730- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3731 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3732 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3733 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003734 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003735
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003736- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003737 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003738
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003739- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3740 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3741 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3742 bounded integers.
3743
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003744- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3745 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3746 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3747 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3748 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3749 in existence.
3750
3751 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3752 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3753 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3754 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3755 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3756 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3757
3758 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3759 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3760 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3761 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3762
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003763- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3764 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3765 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3766
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003767- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3768
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003769- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3770 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3771 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3772 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3773
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003774- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3775 argument.
3776
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003777- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3778 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3779 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3780 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3781 [SF patch 560794].
3782
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003783- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3784 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3785 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003786 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3787 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3788 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003789
3790- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3791 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003792
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003793- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3794 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3795 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3796 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003797
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003798- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3799 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3800 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3801 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3802 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3803
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003804- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003805
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003806- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3807
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003808- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3809 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3810 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3811 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3812 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3813 identical to None.
3814
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003815- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3816 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3817 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3818 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3819 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3820 results now.
3821
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003822- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3823 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3824
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003825- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3826 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3827 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3828 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3829 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3830 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3831 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3832 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3833
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003834- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3835
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003836- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3837 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3838
3839- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3840 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3841 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3842 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3843 and other systems.
3844
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003845- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3846 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3847 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3848 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 +00003849 work well with these.
3850
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003851- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3852
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003853- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003854 connections.
3855
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003856- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3857 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3858 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3859
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003860- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3861 sets
3862
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003863- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3864 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3865 name.
3866
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003867- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3868 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3869 passed in.
3870
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003871- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003872 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003873 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3874 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003875
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003876- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3877
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003878- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3879
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003880- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3881 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3882 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3883
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003884- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3885 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3886 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3887 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003888 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003889
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003890- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003891 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003892 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003893
3894- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3895 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3896 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3897
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003898- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003899 the value of its expression argument.
3900
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003901- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3902 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3903 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3904
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003905- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3906 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3907 skipstone browser was included.
3908
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003909- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3910 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3911
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003912Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003914
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003915- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3916 names in addition to accepting file names.
3917
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003918- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3919 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3920 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3921 still used and useful.)
3922
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003923- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3924 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3925 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3926 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003927
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003928- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3929 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3930 the generated binary.
3931
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003932Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003934
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003935- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3936
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003937- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3938 except in the hands of experts.
3939
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003940- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003941 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3942 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3943 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003944
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003945- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3946 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3947 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3948 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3949 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3950 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3951 builds.
3952
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003953- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3954 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3955 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3956 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3957 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3958 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3959 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3960 new type.
3961
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003962- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003963
3964 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3965 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3966 positive infinities.
3967
3968 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3969 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3970 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3971 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3972 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3973 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3974 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3975
3976 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3977
3978 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3979
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003980- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3981 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3982 size of the executable.
3983
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003984- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3985 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3986 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3987 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003988
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003989- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3990
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003991- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3992 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3993 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003994
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003995- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3996 well as Unix.
3997
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003998- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3999 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4000 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4001 modules in the README file for details.
4002
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004003C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004005
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004006- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4007 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004008 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004009 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004010 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004011
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004012- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4013 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4014 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4015 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4016 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4017 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004018 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004019 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4020 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4021 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4022 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4023 aligned.)
4024
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004025- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4026 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4027 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4028
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004029- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4030 level.
4031
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004032- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4033 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4034 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4035 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4036 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4037
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004038- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4039 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4040 code.
4041
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004042- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4043 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4044 adjusting for negative indices.
4045
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004046- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4047 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4048 object.
4049
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004050- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4051 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4052 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4053
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004054- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4055 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004056
4057- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4058
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004059- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4060 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4061 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4062 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4063
4064- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4065
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004066- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004067
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004068- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004069 without going through the buffer API.
4070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004072
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004073- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4074 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4075 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4076 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004078- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4079 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4080
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004081- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004082 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4083
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004084New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004086
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004087- OpenVMS is now supported.
4088
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004089- AtheOS is now supported.
4090
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004091- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4092
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004093- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4094
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004095Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096-----
4097
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004098- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4099 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4100 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004101
4102Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004104
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004105- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4106 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4107 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4108 bugs.
4109 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004110 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004111 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4112 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004113 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004114
4115- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004116 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004117
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004118- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4119 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4120
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004121- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4122 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004123 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004124 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4125
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004126- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4127 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4128 use files" uninstall option).
4129
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004130- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4131
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004132- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4133 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4134
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004135- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4136 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4137 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4138
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004139- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4140 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4141 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4142 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4143 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004144 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4145 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4146 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004147
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004148- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004149 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004150 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4151 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4152 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4153 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4154 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4155 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4156 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4157 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4158 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4159 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4160 work around.
4161
4162- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4163 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4164 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4165 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4166 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4167 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4168 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4169 specified with O_CREAT too).
4170
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004171Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172----
4173
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004174- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004175
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004176- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4177 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4178 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4179
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004180- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4181 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4182 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4183
4184- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4185 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4186 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4187 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4188 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4189 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4190 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4191 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004192
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004193- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4194 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4195 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004196
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004197- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4198 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4199 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4200 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4201 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004202
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004203- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4204 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4205 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004206
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004207- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4208 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004209
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004210- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4211 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4212 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4213 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4214 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004215
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004216- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4217 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4218 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4219
4220- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4221 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4222 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004223
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004224- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4225 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4226 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4227 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004228 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004229
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004230- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4231 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004232
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004233- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4234 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004235
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004236- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004237 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004238 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4239 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004240
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004241
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004242What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004243===============================
4244
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4246
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004247Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004249
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004250- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4251 with a custom metaclass.
4252
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004253Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004255
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004256- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4257 are proxies.
4258
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004259Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004261
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004262- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4263 very short strings.
4264
4265- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4266 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4267 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4268 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4269 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4270
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004271Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004273
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004274- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4275 close or delete time).
4276
4277- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4278 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4279
4280- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4281
4282- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004283 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004284
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004285Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004287
4288Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004290
4291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004293
4294New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004296
4297Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004299
4300Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004302
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004303- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4304
4305- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4306 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4307
4308- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4309 deleted at process exit time.
4310
4311- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4312 in backslash.
4313
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004314Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004316
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004317- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4318 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4319 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4320
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004321
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004322What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004323===========================
4324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4326
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004327Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004329
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004330- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4331 been extensively updated. See
4332
4333 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4334
4335 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4336
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004337- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4338 deleted!
4339
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004340- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4341 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4342 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4343 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4344 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4345
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004346- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4347
4348 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4349 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4350
4351 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4352 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4353 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4354 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4355 supported anyway.
4356
4357 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4358 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4359
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004360- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4361 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4362 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4363 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4364 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004365
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004366- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4367 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4368 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4369
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004370Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004372
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004373- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4374 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4375 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4376 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4377 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4378 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004379 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4380 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4381 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4382 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004383
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004384- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4385 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4386 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4387
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004388Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004390
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004391- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4392
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004393Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004395
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004396- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4397 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4398 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4399 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4400 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4401 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4402
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004403- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4404
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004405- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4406
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004407- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4408
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004409- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4410 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4411 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4412
4413- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4414
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004415Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004417
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004418- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4419 off a search on Google.
4420
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004421Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004423
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004424- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4425 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4426 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4427 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4428 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4429 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4430 other platforms should do likewise.
4431
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004432- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4433 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4434 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4435
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004436C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004438
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004439- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4440 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4441 producing key-value pairs.
4442
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004443- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004444 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004445 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4446 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4447 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4448 previously went unchallenged.
4449
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004450New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004452
4453Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004455
4456Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004458
4459Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004461
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004462- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4463 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004464
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004465- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4466 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4467 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4468 home.
4469
4470
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004471What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472===========================
4473
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4475
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004476Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004478
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004479- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4480 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004481
4482 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004483 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004484
4485 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4486 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004487 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004488 This needs to be documented.
4489
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004490- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4491 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4492
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004493- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4494 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4495 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4496
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004497- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4498 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4499
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004500- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4501 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4502 class forbids it).
4503
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004504- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4505 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4506 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4507
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004508- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4509
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004510Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004512
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004513- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4514 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004515 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004516
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004517- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4518 (like 1 + '').
4519
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004520Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004522
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004523- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4524 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4525 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4526 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004527 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004528 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4529
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004530- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4531 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4532 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4533 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4534
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004535- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4536 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004537 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4538 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4539 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004540
4541- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4542 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004543
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004544- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4545 bytes on its input.
4546
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004547Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004549
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004550- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004551 convenience function.
4552
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004553- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4554 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4555 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004556 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4557 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4558 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4559 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4560 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4561 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004562
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004563- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4564 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4565 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4566 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4567
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004568- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4569 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4570 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4571
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004572- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4573 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4574 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4575 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4576
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004577- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4578 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004580 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4581 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4582 new -l and -e options.
4583
4584- statcache is now deprecated.
4585
4586- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4587 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004589 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4590 time properly taken into account.
4591
4592- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4593 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4594 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4595 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4596
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004597Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004599
4600Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004602
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004603- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4604 is built with libdb3 if available.
4605
4606- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4607
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004608C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004610
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004611- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4612 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4613 PySequence_Size().
4614
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004615- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4616
4617- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4618 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4619 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4620
4621- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4622 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4623
4624- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4625 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4626
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004627New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004629
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004630- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4631 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4632
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004633- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4634 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4635
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004636- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4637
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004638Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004640
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004641- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4642 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004644Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004646
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004647Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004649
4650- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4651 removed completely in the next release.
4652
4653- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4654 OSX.
4655
4656- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4657 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4658
4659- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4660
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004661
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004662What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004663===========================
4664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4666
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004667Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004669
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004670- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004671 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004672 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004673 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4674 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004675 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4676 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004677 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4678 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004679
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004680- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4681 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4682
4683- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4684 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4685
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004686Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004688
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004689- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4690 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4691 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4692 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4693 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4694 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4695 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4696 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4697
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004698- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4699 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4700 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4701 example).
4702
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004703- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004704 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004705 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004706 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004707
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004708- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4709 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4710 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004711 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004712
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004713- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4714 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4715 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4716 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4717 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4718 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4719
4720 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4721
4722 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4723
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004724Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004726
4727- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4728
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004729- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4730
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004731- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4732 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004733
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004734- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4735 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4736 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4737 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4738 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4739 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004740 attributes.
4741
4742- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4743 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4744 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004745
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004746- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4747 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4748 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004749
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004750- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4751 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4752 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004753 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4754 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4755
4756- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4757 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004758
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004759Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004761
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004762- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4763 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4764
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004765- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4766 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4767 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4768 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4769
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004770- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4771 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4772 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4773 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4774
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004775 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4776 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4777 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4778 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4779 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4780 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4781 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4782 without losing information).
4783
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004784- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004785 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4786 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4787 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4788 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4789 module).
4790
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004791 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004792 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4793 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4794 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4795 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004796
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004797- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004798 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4799 encoding.
4800
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004801- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4802 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4803
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004805 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4806
4807- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4808 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4809 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4810 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4811
4812- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4813
4814- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4815 ON, and OFF.
4816
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004817- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4818 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4819
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004820Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004822
4823- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4824 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4825 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004826
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004827- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4828 been added: -X and -E.
4829
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004830Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004832
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004833- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4834 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4835
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004836C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004838
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004839- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4840 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4841 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4842 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4843 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4844
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004845- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4846 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4847 as long) arguments.
4848
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004849- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4850 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4851 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4852 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4853 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4854 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4855
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004856- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4857 input.
4858
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004859New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004861
4862Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004864
4865Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004867
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004868- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4869 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4870 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4871
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004872- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4873 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4874 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004875 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4878 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4879 import signal
4880 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004881
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004883 while 1:
4884 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004886 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4887 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4888 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4889 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004890
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004892What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4893===========================
4894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4896
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004897Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004899
4900- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4901 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4902 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4903
4904- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4905 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4906 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4907 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4908 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4909 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4910 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004911
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004912- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004913 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004914 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4915 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4916 associate a docstring with a property.
4917
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004918- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4919 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4920 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4921 other built-in object types.
4922
4923- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4924 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4925 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4926 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4927 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4928
4929- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4930 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4931
4932- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4933 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004934 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004935 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4936 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4937 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4938 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4939 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4940
4941- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4942 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4943 class.
4944
4945- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4946 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4947 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4948 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4949
4950- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4951 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4952 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4953 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4954
4955- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4956 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4957
4958- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4959 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4960 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4961 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4962 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004963 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004964 with the same value as s.
4965
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004966- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4967
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004968Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004970
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004971- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4972
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004973- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4974 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4975 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4976 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4977 objects.
4978
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004979- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4980 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004981 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4982 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4983
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004984- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4985 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4986 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4987
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004988Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004990
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004991- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4992 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4993 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4994 by the instances.
4995
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004996- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4997 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4998 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4999
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005000- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5001 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5002 before the entire comparison is complete.
5003
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005004- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5005 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5006 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5007
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005008- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5009 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5010 getwriter().
5011
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005012- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5013 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5014
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005015- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005016 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5017 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5018
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005019- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5020 iterable object.
5021
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005022- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5023 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005024
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005025- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5026 authentication.
5027
5028- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5029 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005030
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005031- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005032 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5033 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5034 a sample driver.)
5035
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005036Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005038
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005039- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5040 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5041 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5042 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5043 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5044 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5045 kernel has large file support.
5046
5047- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5048 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5049 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5050 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5051 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5052
5053- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5054 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5055 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005057C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005059
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005060- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5061 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5062
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005063New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005065
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005066- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5067 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5068
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005069Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005071
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005072- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5073 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5074 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5075 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5076 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5077
5078- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5079 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5080 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5081 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5082
5083- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5084 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5085
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005088
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005089- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005090 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5091 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005092
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005093
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005094What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5095===========================
5096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5098
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005099Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005101
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005102- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5103 big to represent as a C double.
5104
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005105- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5106 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5107 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5108 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5109 restriction).
5110
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005111- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5112 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5113 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5114 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5115 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5116
5117 >>> dir([])
5118 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5119 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5120 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5121 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5122 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5123 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5124 'reverse', 'sort']
5125
5126 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5127
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005128- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005129 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5130 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5131 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5132 OverflowError exception.
5133
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005134- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005135 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005136 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5137 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5138 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5139 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5140 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005141 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5143 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5144
5145 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5146 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5147 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5148 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005149
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005150- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005151 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5152 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5153 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5154 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5155 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5156 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5157 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5158 once it is created.
5159
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005160- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5161 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5162 (key, value) pairs.
5163
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005164- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005165 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5166 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5167
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005168- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5169 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5170 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5171 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5172 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005173
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005174- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005175 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5176 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5177
5178 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5179
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005180- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005181 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5182
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005183Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005185
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005186- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005187 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5188 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005189
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005190- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5191 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5192 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5193 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5194 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5195 in this area anymore).
5196
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005197- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5198 threading.Timer.
5199
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005200- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5201 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5202
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005203- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005204 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5205
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005206- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005207 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5208 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5209 converted to Python longs.
5210
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005211- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005212 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5213
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005214- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5215 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5216 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005218Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005220
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005221- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5222 division operators as per PEP 238.
5223
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005226
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005227- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5228 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5229 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5230 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5231
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005232C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005233-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005234
5235- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005236
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005237- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5238 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005239 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5242 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005243 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005245
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005246- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005247 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5248 module:
5249
5250 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005251
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005252 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5253 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005254
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005255 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5256 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005257
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005258 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5259
5260 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5261
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005262- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005263 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5264 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5265 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005266
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005267New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005269
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005270- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5271 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5272 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5273 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5274 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005275
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005276Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005278
5279Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005281
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005282- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5283 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5284 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5285 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005286 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5287 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5288 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5289 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5290 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005291
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005292- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005293 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5294
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005295
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005296What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5297===========================
5298
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5300
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005301Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005302-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005303
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005304- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5305 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5306
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005307- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5308 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5309 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005310
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005311- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5312 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5313 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5314 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005315
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005316- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5317
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005319
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005320Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005322
5323- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005324 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005325 the module docstring for details.
5326
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005327Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005329
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005330- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005331 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5332 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5333 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005334
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005335- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5336 Nick Mathewson.
5337
5338Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005340
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005341- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5342 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5343 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5344 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5345 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5346 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5347 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5348 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5349
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005350- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5351 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5352 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5353 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5354
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005355- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5356 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5357 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5358 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5359 come a long way).
5360
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005361- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5362 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5363 write filters for these warnings).
5364
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005365- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5366 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5367 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5368 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5369 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5370
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005371- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5372 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5373 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5374 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5375 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5376 older distribution.
5377
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005378Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005380
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005381- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5382 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005383 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005384
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005385- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5386 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5387 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5388
5389- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5390
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005391- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5392
5393- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5394
5395- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5396
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005398
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005399- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5400
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005401New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005403
5404C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005405-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005406
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005407- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5408 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5409 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5410 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5411 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5412 against buffer overruns.
5413
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005414- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005415 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5416 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005417 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5418 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5419 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5420
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005421- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5422 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5423 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5424 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5425 deprecated.
5426
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005427Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005429
5430- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5431 relevant is found.
5432
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005433
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005434What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005435===========================
5436
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5438
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005439Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005440----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005441
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005442- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5443 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5444 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5445 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5446 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5447 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5448 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5449 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005450 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005451 repaired.
5452
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005453- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005454 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005455 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5456 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5457 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5458 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5459 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5460 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5461 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5462 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5463
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005464- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5465 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5466 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5467 leading BMO character).
5468
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005469- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5470 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5471 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5472
5473 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5474 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5475 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005476
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005477 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5478 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5479 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5480 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5481 for various simple to use conversions.
5482
5483 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5484 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5485
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5487 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5488 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5489 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5490 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5491 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5492 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5493 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5494 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5495 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5496 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5497 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5498 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5499 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5500 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005501
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005502- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5503 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5504 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005505 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005506 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005507
5508 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005509 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5510 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5511 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5512 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5513 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005514 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5515 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005516
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005517 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5518 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5519 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005520 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005521
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005522- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5523 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5524 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5525 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5526 floating arithmetic,
5527
5528 x = 9007199254740992.0
5529 print long(x)
5530
5531 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5532 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5533 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5534 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5535 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5536 functions are of good quality).
5537
5538 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5539 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5540 algorithms to break.
5541
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005542- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5543 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5544 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5545 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5546 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5547 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5548 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5549 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5550 order.
5551
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005552- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5553 operation along the most common code paths.
5554
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005555- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5556 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5557
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005558- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5559 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5560 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5561 {}.update(UserDict())
5562
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005563- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5564 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5565 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5566 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5567 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5568 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5569 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5570 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5571
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005572- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005573 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005574
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005575 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005576 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5577 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005578 join() method of strings
5579 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005580 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5581 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005583 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005584
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005585- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5586 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5587
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005588- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5589 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5590
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005591- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5592 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5593 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5594 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5595
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005596- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5597 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005598 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005599 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5600 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005601
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005602- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5603
5604
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005606-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005607
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005608- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005609 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005610 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5611 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5612
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005613- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5614 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5615
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005616- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5617 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5618 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5619 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5620
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005621- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5622 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5623 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5624
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005625- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5626
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005627- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5628
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005629- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5630 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5631 that are still imported into string.py).
5632
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005633- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5634
5635- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5636 Now it does.
5637
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005638- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5639
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005640- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5641 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5642 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5643 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5644 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005645 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5646 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005647
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005648- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5649 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5650 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5651 'help(object)'.
5652
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005653Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005654-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005655
5656- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005657 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005658 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5659 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5660
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005661- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005662 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5663 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005664
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005665C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005666-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005667
5668- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5669 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670
5671----
5672
5673**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**