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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000015- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
16
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000017- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
18 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
19 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
20 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
21 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
22 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
23 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
24 records with equal keys is unchanged).
25
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000026- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
27 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000028
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000029- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
30 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
31 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
32
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000033- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
34 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
35 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
36 freelist.
37
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000038- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
39 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
40
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000041- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
42 number.
43
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000044- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
45 a TypeError exception.
46
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000047- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
48 820195.
49
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000050- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
51 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
52 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
53
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000054Extension modules
55-----------------
56
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000057- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
58 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
59 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
60
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000061- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
62
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000063- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
64
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000065- readline.clear_history was added.
66
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000067- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
68
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000069- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
70
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000071- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
72
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000073- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
74
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000075- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
76
77- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
78
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000079- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
80
81- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
82
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000083- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
84 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
85 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
86
87- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
88 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
89 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
90 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
91 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
92 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
93 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
94
95- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
96 iterators from a single iterable.
97
98- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
99 of raising a TypeError exception.
100
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000101Library
102-------
103
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000104- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
105
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000106- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
107
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000108- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
109
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000110- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
111 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
112 list of fieldnames.
113
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000114- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
115 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
116
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000117- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
118
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000119- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
120 empty lists.
121
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000122- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
123 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
124 and shelves.
125
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000126- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
127 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
128
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000129- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000130 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
131 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000132
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000133- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
134 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
135 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
136 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000137
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000138- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000139 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
140 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
141
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000142- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
143 and removed in Py2.4.
144
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000145Tools/Demos
146-----------
147
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000148- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
149
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000150- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
151 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
152 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
153 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
154
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000155- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
156
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000157- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
158 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
159 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
160 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
161 now.
162
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000163- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
164 in effect
165
166- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
167 C-c C-h
168
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000169- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
170 -d option was given.
171
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000172Build
173-----
174
175C API
176-----
177
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000178- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
179 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
180
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000181- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
182 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
183 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
184 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
185
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000186New platforms
187-------------
188
189Tests
190-----
191
192Windows
193-------
194
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000195- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
196 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
197 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
198
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000199Mac
200----
201
202
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000203What's New in Python 2.3 final?
204===============================
205
206*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
207
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000208IDLE
209----
210
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000211- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
212 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
213 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
214 context-menu actions.
215
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000216- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
217 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
218 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
219 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
220 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
221 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
222 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
223 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
224 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
225
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000226
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000227What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
228=============================================
229
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000230*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000231
232Core and builtins
233-----------------
234
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000235- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000236 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000237 comment at the end are still unsupported.
238
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000239Extension modules
240-----------------
241
242- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
243 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
244 than once. This has been fixed.
245
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000246- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
247 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
248 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
249 call.
250
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000251- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
252
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000253Library
254-------
255
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000256- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
257 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
258
259- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
260 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
261 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
262 restored.
263
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000264IDLE
265----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000266
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000267- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000268
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000269Build
270-----
271
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000272- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
273 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
274
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000275C API
276-----
277
278Windows
279-------
280
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000281- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
282 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
283
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000284- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
285
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000286Mac
287---
288
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000289- Various fixes to pimp.
290
291- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
292
293- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
294 more problems than it solves.
295
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000296
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000297What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
298=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000299
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000300*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
301
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000302Core and builtins
303-----------------
304
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000305- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
306 by sys.setcheckinterval().
307
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000308- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
309 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000310 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000311
312- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
313 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
314 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000315 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000316
317- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
318 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000319
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000320- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
321 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
322 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
323
324- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000325 770247.
326
327- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000328
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000329Extension modules
330-----------------
331
332- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
333 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
334
335- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
336
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000337- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
338
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000339- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
340 contained within the _strptime module.
341
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000342- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
343 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
344
345- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000346 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
347
348- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
349 the find_class attribute, if present.
350
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000351- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000352
353 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
354 (SF bug 763298).
355
356 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000357 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
358 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
359 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000360
361 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
362
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000363Library
364-------
365
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000366- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
367
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000368- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
369 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
370 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
371 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
372 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
373 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
374 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
375 or Tester().
376
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000377- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
378 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
379 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
380 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
381 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
382 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
383 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
384 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
385 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000386
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000387 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000388
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000389- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
390 weren't before was an oversight.
391
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000392- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
393 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
394
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000395- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
396 when there are no lines.
397
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000398- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
399 which could occur with Tk 8.4
400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000401- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
402 to child processes.
403
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000404- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
405
406- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
407
408- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
409 xmlrpclib.
410
411- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
412 responses.
413
414- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
415 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
416
417- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
418 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
419 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
420
421- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
422 used as patterns.
423
424- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
425 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
426 than Tk 8.3.
427
428- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
429
430- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000432Tools/Demos
433-----------
434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000435- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
436
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000437- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
438
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000439- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000440
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000441Build
442-----
443
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000444- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000446- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
447
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000448- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
449 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000450
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000451- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
452 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
453 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000454
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000455C API
456-----
457
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000458- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
459 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
460
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000461Windows
462-------
463
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000464- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
465 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
466 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
467 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
468 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
469 Python exception ::
470
471 thread.error: can't start new thread
472
473 is raised now.
474
475- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
476 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
477 instead of from DLL teardown.
478
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000479Mac
480---
481
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000482- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000483 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000484 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
485 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
486 the executable in the bundle.
487
488- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000489
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000490- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
491
492- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
493 on Panther.
494
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000495What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
496================================
497
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000498*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000499
500Core and builtins
501-----------------
502
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000503- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
504 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
505 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
506 with the -i option.
507
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000508- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
509 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
510
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000511- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
512 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
513
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000514- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
515 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
516 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
517 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
518 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
519 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
520 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
521 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
522 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
523 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
524 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
525 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
526 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000527
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000528- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
529 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
530 embedded in a lambda expression.
531
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000532- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
533 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
534 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
535 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
536 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
537
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000538- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
539 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
540 matches the restriction on classic classes.
541
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000542- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
543 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
544
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000545- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
546 It's writable again.
547
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000548- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
549 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
550 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000551 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000552
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000553- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
554 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
555 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
556
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000557Extension modules
558-----------------
559
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000560- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
561 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
562
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000563- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
564 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
565 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
566 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
567
568- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
569 collection.
570
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000571- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
572 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
573 unique within a single program run.
574
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000575- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
576 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
577
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000578- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
579 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
580
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000581- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
582 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000583
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000584- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
585
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000586- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
587 Fixes SF bug #730685.
588
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000589- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
590 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
591 for many BSD-derived systems.
592
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000593
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000594Library
595-------
596
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000597- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
598 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
599 primary ones:
600
601 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
602 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
603 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
604
605 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
606 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
607 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
608 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
609 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
610 framework features (which doctest lacks).
611
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000612- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
613 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
614 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
615 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
616 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
617 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
618 argument.
619
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000620- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
621 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
622 in the archive.
623
624- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
625 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
626
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000627- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
628 569574).
629
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000630- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
631 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
632 no more.
633
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000634- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
635 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
636 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
637 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
638 code coverage.
639
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000640- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
641 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
642 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000643 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
644 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000645
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000646- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
647 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
648 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000649 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000650
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000651- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
652
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000653- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
654 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
655 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
656 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
657
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000658- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
659 handling.
660
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000661- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
662 __doc__ of data descriptors.
663
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000664- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
665 in socket.py.
666
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000667- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
668
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000669- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
670 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
671 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
672 opener with proxy support.
673
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000674- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
675
676- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
677
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000678Tools/Demos
679-----------
680
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000681- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
682
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000683- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
684
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000685- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
686 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000687
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000688- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
689 files.
690
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000691Build
692-----
693
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000694- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000695 different root directory.
696
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000697C API
698-----
699
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000700- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
701 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
702 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
703 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
704 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
705 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
706 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
707 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
708 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
709 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
710
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000711- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
712 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
713 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
714 from Python.
715
716
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000717New platforms
718-------------
719
720None this time.
721
722Tests
723-----
724
725- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
726 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
727
728Windows
729-------
730
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000731- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
732
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000733- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
734 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
735 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
736 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
737 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
738 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
739 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
740 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
741 that's what it's for.
742
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000743Mac
744---
745
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000746- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
747 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
748 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
749 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000750- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
751 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
752- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000753
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000754SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
755------------------------------------
756
757430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
758598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
759622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
760661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
761683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
762697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
763713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
764724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
765727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
766729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
767730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
768731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
769732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
770733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
771735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
772740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
773744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
774745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
775747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
776749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
777751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
778753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
779755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
780757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
781760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
782
783
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000784What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
785================================
786
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000787*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000788
789Core and builtins
790-----------------
791
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000792- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
793 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
794
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000795- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
796 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
797 and cannot be strings).
798
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000799- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
800 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
801 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
802 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
803
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000804- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
805 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
806 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
807 Python itself.
808
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000809- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
810 the referenced object, if it has one.
811
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000812- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
813 the thread started at
814 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
815
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000816- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
817 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
818 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
819 placed on a list index.
820
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000821- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
822 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
823 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
824 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
825
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000826- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
827 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
828 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
829 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
830 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
831 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
832 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
833
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000834- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
835 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
836 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
837 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
838 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
839
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000840- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
841 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000842
843- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
844 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
845 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
846 #693195.)
847
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000848- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
849 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000850
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000851- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000852 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000853 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
854 interpreter executions, would fail.
855
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000856- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000857 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000858 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000859
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000860Extension modules
861-----------------
862
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000863- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
864 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
865 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
866 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
867
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000868- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
869 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
870
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000871- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
872 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
873 and Greg Chapman.)
874
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000875- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
876 recursively.
877
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000878- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000879 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
880 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
881 leaks.
882
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000883- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
884
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000885- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
886 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
887 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
888 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
889 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
890 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
891 #705836.
892
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000893- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000894 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
895
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000896- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
897 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
898 See SF bug #692416.
899
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000900- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
901 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
902
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000903- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
904 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
905 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000906
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000907- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000908 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
909 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
910
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000911- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
912 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
913 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
914 timeouts to work properly.
915
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000916Library
917-------
918
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000919- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
920 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
921 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
922 future release.
923
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000924- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
925 for querying platform dependent features.
926
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000927- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000928
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000929- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
930 pickle protocol versions.
931
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000932- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
933 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
934 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
935
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000936- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
937
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000938- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
939 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
940 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
941 modules.
942
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000943- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
944 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
945 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
946
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000947- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
948 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
949
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000950- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
951 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
952 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
953
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000954- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000955 MS Office extensions.
956
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000957- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
958 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
959
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000960- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
961 execution speed of expressions and statements.
962
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000963- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
964 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
965 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
966 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
967 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
968 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
969
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000970- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
971 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
972 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000973
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000974- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
975 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
976 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
977
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000978- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
979
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000980- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
981 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
982 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
983
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000984Tools/Demos
985-----------
986
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000987- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
988 See the module docstring for details.
989
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000990Build
991-----
992
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000993- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
994 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000995
996C API
997-----
998
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000999- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1000
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001001- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1002 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1003 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1004
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001005- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1006 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001007
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001008 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1009 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1010 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001011
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001012- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001013 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1014
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001015- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1016 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1017 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001018
1019New platforms
1020-------------
1021
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001022None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001023
1024Tests
1025-----
1026
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001027- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1028 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001029
1030Windows
1031-------
1032
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001033- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1034 function.
1035
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001036- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1037 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001038
1039Mac
1040---
1041
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001042- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1043 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001044
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001045- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1046 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001047
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001048- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1049 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1050 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001051
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001052- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001053 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1054 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001055
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001056- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1057 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001058
1059
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001060What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1061=================================
1062
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001063*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001064
1065Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001066-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001067
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001068- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1069 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1070 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1071
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001072- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1073 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1074 (SF patch #664376.)
1075
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001076- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1077 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1078 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1079 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1080 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1081 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001082 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001083
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001084- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1085 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1086 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1087 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001088 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001089
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001090- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1091 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1092 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1093 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1094 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1095 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1096 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1097 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1098 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1099 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1100 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1101
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001102- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1103 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1104 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1105 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1106 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1107 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1108
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001109- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1110 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1111
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001112- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1113 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1114 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1115 case.)
1116
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001117- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1118 passed as unicode strings.
1119
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001120- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1121 See SF bug #683467.
1122
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001123- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1124 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1125
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001126- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1127
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001128- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1129
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001130- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1131 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1132 arguments.
1133
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001134- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1135 See SF bug #667147.
1136
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001137- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001138 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001139 See SF bug #676155.
1140
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001141- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001142 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001143 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1144 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1145 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1146 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1147 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1148 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001149
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001150Extension modules
1151-----------------
1152
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001153- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1154 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1155 tp_as_number pointer.
1156
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001157- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1158 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1159 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1160 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1161 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1162
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001163- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1164
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001165- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1166
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001167- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001168 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001169 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1170 patch #678531.)
1171
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001172- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1173 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1174
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001175- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1176 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1177
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001178- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1179
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001180- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1181 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1182 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1183
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001184- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1185
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001186- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1187 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1188
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001189- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001190
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001191- datetime changes:
1192
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001193 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1194
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001195 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1196 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1197 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1198 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1199 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1200 now.
1201
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001202 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001203 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1204 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001205
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001206 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001207 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001208 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1209 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1210 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1211 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001212
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001213 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1214 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1215 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001216 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1217
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001218 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1219 by a later example coded by Guido.
1220
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001221 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001222 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1223 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1224 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001225 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1226 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1227
1228 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1229 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1230 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1231 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1232 tzinfo subclass instance.
1233
1234 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1235 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1236 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1237 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1238 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1239 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1240 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1241 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001242
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001243 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1244 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1245 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1246 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1247 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001248 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1249
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001250 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001251
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001252 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1253 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1254 as a naive datetime object.
1255
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001256 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1257 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1258 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1259
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001260 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1261 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1262 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1263 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1264 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1265 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1266 comparison.
1267
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001268 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1269 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1270 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1271 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001272 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001273
1274 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001275
1276 and ::
1277
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001278 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1279
1280 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1281 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1282 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1283 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1284
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001285 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1286 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1287 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1288 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1289 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1290
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001291 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1292 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001293 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1294 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001295
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001296Library
1297-------
1298
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001299- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1300 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1301
1302- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1303 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1304 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1305 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1306 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1307 See PEP 307 for details.
1308
1309- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1310 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1311
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001312- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1313 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001314 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001315 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1316 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001317 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001318
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001319- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1320 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1321
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001322- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1323 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1324 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1325
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001326- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1327
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001328- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1329 exception.
1330
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001331- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1332 class.
1333
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001334- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1335 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1336 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1337
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001338- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1339 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1340
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001341- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001342 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1343 See SF bug #659228.
1344
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001345- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1346 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1347 See SF patch #651082.
1348
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001349- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001350
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001351- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1352 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1353
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001354- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001355 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001356
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001357- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1358 DOS paths from other platforms.
1359
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001360Tools/Demos
1361-----------
1362
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001363- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1364 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1365 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1366 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1367 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1368 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1369 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1370 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1371 example:
1372
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001373 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1374 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001375
1376 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1377
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001378
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001379Build
1380-----
1381
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001382- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1383 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1384 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001385 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1386
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001387 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1388
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001389- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1390 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1391 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1392 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1393 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1394 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1395 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1396 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1397 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1398
1399- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1400 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1401 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1402 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1403
1404- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1405 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1406
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001407C API
1408-----
1409
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001410- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1411 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001412
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001413- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1414 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1415 tp_as_number pointer.
1416
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001417- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1418 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1419 (SF #681367)
1420
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001421- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1422 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1423 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1424 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001426Tests
1427-----
1428
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001429- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001430 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1431 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1432 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1433 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1434 pydoc.)
1435
1436- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1437
1438- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001439
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001440Windows
1441-------
1442
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001443- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1444 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1445 time).
1446
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001447- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1448 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1449
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001450- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1451 release without strong cryptography.
1452
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001453- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001454 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001455
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001456- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1457 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001459Mac
1460---
1461
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001462- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1463 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001464
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001465- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1466 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1467 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001468
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001469- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1470 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001471
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001472- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1473 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1474 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1475 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001476
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001477- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001478 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1479 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1480 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001481
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001482
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001483What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001484=================================
1485
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001486*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001487
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001488Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001489--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001490
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001491- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1492
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001493- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1494 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001495 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001496 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001497 a different meaning than before.
1498
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001499- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001500 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001501 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001502
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001503- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001504 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001505 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001506
1507- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1508 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1509 and deallocation.
1510
1511- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1512 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1513
1514- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1515 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1516 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1517 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1518 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1519
1520- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1521 now detected by the garbage collector.
1522
1523- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1524 [SF bug 519621]
1525
1526- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1527 identifier.
1528
1529- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1530 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1531 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1532 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1533 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1534 [SF bug 563060]
1535
1536- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1537 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1538 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1539 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1540 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1541
1542- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1543 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1544 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1545
1546- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1547
1548- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1549 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1550 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1551 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1552 state of the slots would be lost.)
1553
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001554Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001555-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001556
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001557- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001558 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1559 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1560 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1561 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001562 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1563 Jython 2.1.
1564
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001565- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001566 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001567 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1568 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1569 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1570 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1571 these, see PEP 302.
1572
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001573- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1574 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1575 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1576
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001577- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1578 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1579 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1580
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001581- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1582 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1583 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1584
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001585- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1586 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1587 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1588 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1589 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1590 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1591 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1592 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1593 releases or implementations.
1594
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001595- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001596 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1597 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001598
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001599- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1600 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1601
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001602- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1603 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1604 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1605
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001606- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1607 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1608
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001609- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1610 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001611 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1612 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001613
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001614- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1615 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1616 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1617 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1618 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1619
1620 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1621 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1622 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1623 pattern.
1624
1625 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1626 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1627 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1628 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1629
1630 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1631 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1632 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1633 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1634 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1635 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1636
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001637- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1638 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1639 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1640 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1641 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1642 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1643 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1644 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001645
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001646- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1647 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1648 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1649 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1650 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001651 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1652 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1653 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1654 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1655 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1656 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1657 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001658
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001659- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1660 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1661
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001662- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1663 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1664 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1665 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1666 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1667 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1668 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1669 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1670 to Zack Weinberg!
1671
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001672- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1673 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1674 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1675 type. This has been fixed now.
1676
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001677- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1678 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1679 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1680
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001681- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1682 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1683 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1684 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1685 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1686 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1687 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1688 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001689 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001690
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001691- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1692 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1693 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001694
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001695- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1696 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1697 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1698 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1699 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1700 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1701 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1702 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001703 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001704 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1705 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1706
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001707- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1708 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1709 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1710 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1711 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1712 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1713 this.)
1714
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001715- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1716 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001717 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001718 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001719 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1720 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001721 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1722 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001723
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001724- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1725 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1726 currently running.
1727
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001728- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1729 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1730 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1731 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1732
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001733- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1734 as directory names.
1735
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001736- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1737 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1738
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001739- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1740 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1741
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001742- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001743 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1744 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001745
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001746- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1747 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1748 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1749 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1750 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1751
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001752- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1753 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1754 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1755 removed.
1756
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001757- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1758 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1759 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1760
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001761- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1762 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1763 to __debug__.
1764
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001765- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1766 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1767 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1768
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001769- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1770 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1771 deprecated now.
1772
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001773- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1774 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1775 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001776
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001777- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1778 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1779 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1780 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1781 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001782
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001783- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1784 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1785
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001786- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1787 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1788 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001789 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001790 is backward compatible.
1791
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001792- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1793 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1794 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1795 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1796 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1797
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001798- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1799 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1800 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1801 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1802 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1803 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001804
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001805- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1806 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1807
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001808- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1809 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1810
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001811- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1812 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1813 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1814 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1815 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1816
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001817- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1818 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1819 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1820
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001821- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001822 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1823
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001824- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1825 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1826 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001827
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001828- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1829 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1830
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001831- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1832 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1833 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1834
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001835- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001837Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001838-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001839
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001840- Added three operators to the operator module:
1841 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1842 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1843 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1844
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001845- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1846
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001847- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1848 archives.
1849
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001850- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1851 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1852 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1853
1854 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1855
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001856- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1857 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1858 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001859 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001860
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001861- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1862 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1863 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1864 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001865 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1866 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1867 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1868 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001869
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001870- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1871 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001872
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001873- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1874
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001875- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1876 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1877
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001878- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1879 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1880 supported.
1881
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001882- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1883
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001884- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1885 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001886
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001887- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1888 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1889
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001890- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1891
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001892- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1893 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1894
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001895- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1896 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1897 functions but callable type objects.
1898
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001899- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001900 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001901 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001902
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001903- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1904 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001905
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001906- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1907 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001908
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001909- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1910 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1911 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1912 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1913
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001914- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1915 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001916
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001917- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1918 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1919 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1920 and __imul__.
1921
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001922- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001923 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1924 is called.
1925
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001926- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1927 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1928 interpreter was compiled.
1929
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001930- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1931 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1932 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001933 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001934 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1935 1, not 2.
1936
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001937- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1938 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1939 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1940 limit.
1941
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001942- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1943 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1944 bug #623464.
1945
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001946- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1947 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1948 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1949 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1950
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001951Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001952-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001953
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001954- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1955
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001956- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1957 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1958 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1959 with Python 2.3a2.
1960
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001961- os.path exposes getctime.
1962
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001963- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001964 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001965 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001966 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001967 unit tests of floating point results.
1968
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001969- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1970 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1971 has been increased.
1972
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001973- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1974 executed.
1975
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001976- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1977 postinstallation script.
1978
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001979- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1980 test the current module.
1981
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001982- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001983 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1984 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1985 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1986 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1987
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001988- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001989 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001990 Ward's Optik package.
1991
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001992- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1993 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1994 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1995 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1996
1997- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1998 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001999 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002000
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002001- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2002 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2003 shelf are binary pickles.
2004
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002005- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2006 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2007
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002008- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2009 modules are iterators now.
2010
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002011- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2012 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2013 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2014 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2015 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2016 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002017
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002018- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2019 with their entity value.
2020
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002021- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2022
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002023- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2024 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002025
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002026- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2027 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002028 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002029
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002030- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2031 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2032 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2033 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2034 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2035 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2036 main():
2037
2038 import locale
2039 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2040
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002041- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2042 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2043
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002044- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2045 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2046 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2047 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2048 to the new standard.
2049
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002050- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2051 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2052 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2053 an extension to the database.
2054
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002055- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2056 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2057 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2058 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002059 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002060
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002061- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002062 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002063
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002064- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2065 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2066 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2067 bounded integers.
2068
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002069- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2070 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2071 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2072 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2073 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2074 in existence.
2075
2076 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2077 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2078 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2079 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2080 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2081 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2082
2083 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2084 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2085 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2086 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2087
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002088- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2089 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2090 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2091
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002092- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2093
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002094- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2095 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2096 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2097 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2098
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002099- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2100 argument.
2101
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002102- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2103 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2104 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2105 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2106 [SF patch 560794].
2107
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002108- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2109 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2110 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002111 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2112 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2113 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002114
2115- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2116 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002117
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002118- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2119 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2120 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2121 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002122
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002123- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2124 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2125 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2126 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2127 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2128
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002129- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002130
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002131- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2132
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002133- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2134 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2135 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2136 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2137 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2138 identical to None.
2139
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002140- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2141 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2142 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2143 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2144 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2145 results now.
2146
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002147- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2148 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2149
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002150- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2151 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2152 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2153 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2154 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2155 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2156 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2157 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2158
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002159- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2160
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002161- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2162 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2163
2164- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2165 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2166 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2167 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2168 and other systems.
2169
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002170- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2171 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2172 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2173 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 +00002174 work well with these.
2175
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002176- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2177
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002178- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002179 connections.
2180
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002181- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2182 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2183 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2184
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002185- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2186 sets
2187
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002188- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2189 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2190 name.
2191
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002192- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2193 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2194 passed in.
2195
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002196- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002197 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002198 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2199 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002200
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002201- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2202
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002203- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2204
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002205- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2206 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2207 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2208
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002209- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2210 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2211 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2212 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002213 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002214
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002215- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002216 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002217 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002218
2219- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2220 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2221 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2222
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002223- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002224 the value of its expression argument.
2225
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002226- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2227 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2228 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2229
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002230- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2231 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2232 skipstone browser was included.
2233
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002234- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2235 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2236
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002237Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002239
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002240- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2241 names in addition to accepting file names.
2242
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002243- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2244 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2245 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2246 still used and useful.)
2247
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002248- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2249 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2250 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2251 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002252
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002253- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2254 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2255 the generated binary.
2256
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002257Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002259
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002260- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2261
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002262- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2263 except in the hands of experts.
2264
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002265- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002266 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2267 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2268 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002269
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002270- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2271 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2272 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2273 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2274 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2275 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2276 builds.
2277
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002278- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2279 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2280 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2281 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2282 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2283 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2284 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2285 new type.
2286
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002287- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002288
2289 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2290 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2291 positive infinities.
2292
2293 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2294 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2295 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2296 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2297 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2298 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2299 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2300
2301 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2302
2303 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2304
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002305- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2306 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2307 size of the executable.
2308
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002309- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2310 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2311 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2312 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002313
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002314- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2315
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002316- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2317 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2318 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002319
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002320- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2321 well as Unix.
2322
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002323- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2324 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2325 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2326 modules in the README file for details.
2327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002328C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002329-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002330
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002331- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2332 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002333 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002334 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002335 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002336
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002337- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2338 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2339 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2340 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2341 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2342 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002343 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002344 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2345 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2346 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2347 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2348 aligned.)
2349
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002350- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2351 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2352 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2353
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002354- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2355 level.
2356
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002357- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2358 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2359 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2360 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2361 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2362
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002363- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2364 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2365 code.
2366
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002367- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2368 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2369 adjusting for negative indices.
2370
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002371- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2372 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2373 object.
2374
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002375- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2376 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2377 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2378
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002379- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2380 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002381
2382- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2383
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002384- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2385 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2386 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2387 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2388
2389- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2390
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002391- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002392
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002393- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002394 without going through the buffer API.
2395
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002397
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002398- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2399 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2400 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2401 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2402
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002403- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2404 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2405
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002406- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002407 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2408
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002409New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002410-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002411
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002412- OpenVMS is now supported.
2413
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002414- AtheOS is now supported.
2415
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002416- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2417
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002418- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2419
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002420Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002421-----
2422
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002423- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2424 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2425 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002426
2427Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002428-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002429
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002430- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2431 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2432 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2433 bugs.
2434 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002435 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002436 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2437 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002438 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002439
2440- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002441 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002442
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002443- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2444 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2445
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002446- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2447 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002448 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002449 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2450
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002451- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2452 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2453 use files" uninstall option).
2454
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002455- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2456
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002457- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2458 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2459
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002460- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2461 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2462 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2463
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002464- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2465 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2466 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2467 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2468 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002469 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2470 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2471 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002472
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002473- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002474 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002475 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2476 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2477 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2478 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2479 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2480 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2481 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2482 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2483 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2484 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2485 work around.
2486
2487- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2488 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2489 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2490 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2491 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2492 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2493 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2494 specified with O_CREAT too).
2495
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002496Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002497----
2498
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002499- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002500
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002501- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2502 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2503 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2504
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002505- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2506 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2507 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2508
2509- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2510 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2511 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2512 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2513 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2514 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2515 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2516 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002517
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002518- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2519 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2520 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002521
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002522- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2523 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2524 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2525 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2526 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002527
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002528- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2529 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2530 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002532- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2533 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002534
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002535- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2536 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2537 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2538 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2539 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002540
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002541- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2542 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2543 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2544
2545- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2546 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2547 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002548
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002549- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2550 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2551 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2552 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002553 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002554
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002555- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2556 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002558- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2559 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002560
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002561- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002562 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002563 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2564 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002565
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002566
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002567What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002568===============================
2569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2571
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002572Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002573--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002574
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002575- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2576 with a custom metaclass.
2577
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002578Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002580
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002581- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2582 are proxies.
2583
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002584Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002586
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002587- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2588 very short strings.
2589
2590- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2591 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2592 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2593 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2594 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2595
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002596Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002597-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002598
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002599- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2600 close or delete time).
2601
2602- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2603 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2604
2605- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2606
2607- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002608 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002609
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002610Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002612
2613Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002615
2616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002617-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002618
2619New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002620-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002621
2622Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002623-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002624
2625Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002627
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002628- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2629
2630- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2631 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2632
2633- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2634 deleted at process exit time.
2635
2636- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2637 in backslash.
2638
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002639Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002640----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002641
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002642- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2643 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2644 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2645
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002646
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002647What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002648===========================
2649
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002650*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2651
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002652Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002654
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002655- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2656 been extensively updated. See
2657
2658 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2659
2660 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2661
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002662- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2663 deleted!
2664
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002665- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2666 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2667 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2668 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2669 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2670
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002671- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2672
2673 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2674 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2675
2676 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2677 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2678 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2679 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2680 supported anyway.
2681
2682 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2683 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2684
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002685- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2686 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2687 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2688 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2689 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002690
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002691- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2692 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2693 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2694
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002695Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002696-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002697
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002698- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2699 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2700 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2701 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2702 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2703 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002704 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2705 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2706 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2707 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002708
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002709- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2710 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2711 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2712
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002713Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002714-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002715
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002716- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2717
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002718Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002719-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002720
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002721- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2722 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2723 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2724 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2725 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2726 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2727
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002728- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2729
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002730- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2731
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002732- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2733
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002734- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2735 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2736 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2737
2738- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2739
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002740Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002743- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2744 off a search on Google.
2745
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002748
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002749- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2750 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2751 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2752 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2753 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2754 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2755 other platforms should do likewise.
2756
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002757- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2758 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2759 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2760
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002761C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002763
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002764- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2765 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2766 producing key-value pairs.
2767
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002768- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002769 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002770 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2771 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2772 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2773 previously went unchallenged.
2774
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002775New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002777
2778Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002780
2781Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002783
2784Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002786
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002787- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2788 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002789
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002790- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2791 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2792 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2793 home.
2794
2795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002796What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002797===========================
2798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2800
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002801Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002803
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002804- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2805 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002806
2807 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002808 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002809
2810 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2811 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002812 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002813 This needs to be documented.
2814
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002815- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2816 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2817
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002818- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2819 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2820 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2821
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002822- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2823 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2824
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002825- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2826 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2827 class forbids it).
2828
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002829- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2830 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2831 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2832
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002833- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002835Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002836-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002837
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002838- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2839 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002840 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002841
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002842- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2843 (like 1 + '').
2844
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002845Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002846-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002847
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002848- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2849 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2850 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2851 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002852 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002853 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2854
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002855- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2856 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2857 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2858 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2859
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002860- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2861 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002862 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2863 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2864 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002865
2866- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2867 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002868
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002869- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2870 bytes on its input.
2871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002874
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002875- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002876 convenience function.
2877
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002878- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2879 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2880 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002881 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2882 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2883 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2884 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2885 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2886 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002887
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002888- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2889 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2890 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2891 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2892
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002893- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2894 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2895 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2896
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002897- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2898 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2899 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2900 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2901
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002902- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2903 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002904 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002905 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2906 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2907 new -l and -e options.
2908
2909- statcache is now deprecated.
2910
2911- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2912 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002914 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2915 time properly taken into account.
2916
2917- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2918 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2919 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2920 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2921
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002922Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002924
2925Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002927
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002928- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2929 is built with libdb3 if available.
2930
2931- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2932
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002933C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002935
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002936- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2937 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2938 PySequence_Size().
2939
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002940- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2941
2942- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2943 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2944 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2945
2946- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2947 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2948
2949- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2950 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2951
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002952New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002954
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002955- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2956 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2957
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002958- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2959 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2960
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002961- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2962
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002963Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002965
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002966- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2967 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2968
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002969Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002971
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002972Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002974
2975- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2976 removed completely in the next release.
2977
2978- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2979 OSX.
2980
2981- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2982 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2983
2984- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002986
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002987What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002988===========================
2989
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2991
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002992Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002994
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002995- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002996 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002997 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002998 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2999 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003000 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3001 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003002 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3003 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003004
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003005- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3006 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3007
3008- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3009 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3010
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003011Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003012-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003013
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003014- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3015 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3016 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3017 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3018 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3019 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3020 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3021 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3022
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003023- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3024 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3025 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3026 example).
3027
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003028- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003029 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003030 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003031 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003032
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003033- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3034 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3035 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003036 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003037
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003038- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3039 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3040 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3041 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3042 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3043 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3044
3045 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3046
3047 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3048
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003049Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003051
3052- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3053
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003054- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3055
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003056- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3057 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003058
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003059- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3060 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3061 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3062 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3063 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3064 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003065 attributes.
3066
3067- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3068 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3069 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003070
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003071- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3072 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3073 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003074
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003075- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3076 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3077 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003078 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3079 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3080
3081- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3082 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003083
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003084Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003085-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003086
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003087- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3088 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3089
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003090- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3091 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3092 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3093 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3094
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003095- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3096 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3097 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3098 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3099
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003100 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3101 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3102 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3103 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3104 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3105 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3106 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3107 without losing information).
3108
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003109- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003110 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3111 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3112 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3113 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3114 module).
3115
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003116 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003117 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3118 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3119 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3120 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003121
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003122- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003123 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3124 encoding.
3125
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003126- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3127 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003130 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3131
3132- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3133 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3134 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3135 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3136
3137- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3138
3139- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3140 ON, and OFF.
3141
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003142- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3143 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3144
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003145Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003147
3148- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3149 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3150 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003151
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003152- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3153 been added: -X and -E.
3154
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003155Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003157
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003158- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3159 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3160
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003161C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003163
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003164- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3165 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3166 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3167 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3168 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3169
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003170- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3171 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3172 as long) arguments.
3173
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003174- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3175 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3176 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3177 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3178 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3179 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3180
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003181- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3182 input.
3183
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003186
3187Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003189
3190Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003192
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003193- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3194 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3195 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3196
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003197- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3198 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3199 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003200 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3203 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3204 import signal
3205 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003206
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003208 while 1:
3209 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003211 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3212 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3213 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3214 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003215
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003216
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003217What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3218===========================
3219
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3221
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003222Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003224
3225- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3226 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3227 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3228
3229- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3230 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3231 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3232 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3233 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3234 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3235 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003236
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003237- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003238 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003239 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3240 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3241 associate a docstring with a property.
3242
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003243- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3244 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3245 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3246 other built-in object types.
3247
3248- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3249 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3250 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3251 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3252 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3253
3254- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3255 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3256
3257- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3258 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003259 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003260 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3261 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3262 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3263 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3264 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3265
3266- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3267 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3268 class.
3269
3270- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3271 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3272 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3273 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3274
3275- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3276 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3277 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3278 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3279
3280- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3281 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3282
3283- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3284 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3285 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3286 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3287 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003288 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003289 with the same value as s.
3290
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003291- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3292
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003293Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003295
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003296- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3297
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003298- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3299 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3300 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3301 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3302 objects.
3303
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003304- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3305 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003306 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3307 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3308
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003309- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3310 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3311 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3312
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003313Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003315
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003316- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3317 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3318 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3319 by the instances.
3320
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003321- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3322 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3323 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3324
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003325- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3326 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3327 before the entire comparison is complete.
3328
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003329- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3330 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3331 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3332
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003333- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3334 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3335 getwriter().
3336
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003337- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3338 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3339
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003340- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003341 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3342 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3343
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003344- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3345 iterable object.
3346
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003347- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3348 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003349
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003350- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3351 authentication.
3352
3353- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3354 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003356- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003357 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3358 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3359 a sample driver.)
3360
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003361Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003363
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003364- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3365 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3366 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3367 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3368 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3369 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3370 kernel has large file support.
3371
3372- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3373 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3374 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3375 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3376 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3377
3378- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3379 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3380 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003382C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003384
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003385- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3386 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3387
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003388New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003391- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3392 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3393
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003394Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003396
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003397- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3398 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3399 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3400 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3401 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3402
3403- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3404 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3405 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3406 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3407
3408- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3409 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3410
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003411Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003413
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003414- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003415 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3416 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003417
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003418
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003419What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3420===========================
3421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3423
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003424Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003426
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003427- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3428 big to represent as a C double.
3429
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003430- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3431 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3432 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3433 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3434 restriction).
3435
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003436- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3437 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3438 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3439 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3440 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3441
3442 >>> dir([])
3443 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3444 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3445 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3446 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3447 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3448 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3449 'reverse', 'sort']
3450
3451 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3452
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003453- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003454 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3455 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3456 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3457 OverflowError exception.
3458
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003459- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003460 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003461 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3462 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3463 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3464 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3465 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003466 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3468 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3469
3470 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3471 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3472 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3473 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003474
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003475- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003476 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3477 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3478 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3479 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3480 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3481 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3482 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3483 once it is created.
3484
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003485- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3486 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3487 (key, value) pairs.
3488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003489- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003490 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3491 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3492
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003493- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3494 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3495 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3496 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3497 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003499- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003500 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3501 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3502
3503 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3504
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003505- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003506 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3507
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003508Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003510
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003511- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003512 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3513 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003514
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003515- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3516 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3517 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3518 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3519 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3520 in this area anymore).
3521
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003522- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3523 threading.Timer.
3524
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003525- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3526 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3527
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003528- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003529 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003531- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003532 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3533 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3534 converted to Python longs.
3535
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003536- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003537 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3538
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003539- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3540 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3541 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3542
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003543Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003545
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003546- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3547 division operators as per PEP 238.
3548
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003549Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003551
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003552- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3553 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3554 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3555 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3556
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003557C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003559
3560- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003561
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003562- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3563 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003564 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3567 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003568 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003570
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003571- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003572 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3573 module:
3574
3575 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003576
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003577 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3578 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003579
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003580 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3581 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003582
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003583 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3584
3585 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003587- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003588 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3589 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3590 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003591
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003592New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003594
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003595- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3596 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3597 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3598 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3599 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003600
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003601Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003603
3604Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003606
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003607- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3608 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3609 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3610 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003611 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3612 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3613 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3614 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3615 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003616
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003617- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003618 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3619
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003620
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003621What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3622===========================
3623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3625
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003626Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003628
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003629- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3630 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3631
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003632- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3633 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3634 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003635
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003636- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3637 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3638 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3639 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003640
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003641- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003644
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003645Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003647
3648- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003649 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003650 the module docstring for details.
3651
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003652Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003654
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003655- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003656 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3657 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3658 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003659
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003660- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3661 Nick Mathewson.
3662
3663Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003665
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003666- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3667 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3668 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3669 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3670 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3671 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3672 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3673 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3674
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003675- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3676 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3677 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3678 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3679
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003680- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3681 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3682 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3683 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3684 come a long way).
3685
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003686- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3687 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3688 write filters for these warnings).
3689
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003690- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3691 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3692 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3693 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3694 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3695
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003696- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3697 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3698 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3699 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3700 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3701 older distribution.
3702
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003703Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003705
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003706- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3707 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003708 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003709
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003710- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3711 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3712 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3713
3714- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3715
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003716- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3717
3718- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3719
3720- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3721
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003723
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003724- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3725
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003726New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003728
3729C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003731
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003732- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3733 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3734 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3735 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3736 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3737 against buffer overruns.
3738
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003739- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003740 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3741 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003742 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3743 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3744 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3745
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003746- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3747 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3748 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3749 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3750 deprecated.
3751
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003752Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003754
3755- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3756 relevant is found.
3757
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003758
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003759What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003760===========================
3761
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3763
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003764Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003766
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003767- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3768 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3769 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3770 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3771 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3772 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3773 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3774 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003775 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003776 repaired.
3777
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003778- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003779 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003780 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3781 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3782 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3783 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3784 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3785 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3786 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3787 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3788
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003789- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3790 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3791 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3792 leading BMO character).
3793
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003794- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3795 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3796 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3797
3798 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3799 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3800 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003801
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003802 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3803 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3804 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3805 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3806 for various simple to use conversions.
3807
3808 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3809 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3812 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3813 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3814 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3815 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3816 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3817 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3818 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3819 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3820 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3821 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3822 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3823 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3824 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3825 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003826
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003827- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3828 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3829 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003830 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003831 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003832
3833 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003834 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3835 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3836 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3837 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3838 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003839 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3840 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003841
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003842 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3843 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3844 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003845 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003846
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003847- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3848 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3849 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3850 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3851 floating arithmetic,
3852
3853 x = 9007199254740992.0
3854 print long(x)
3855
3856 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3857 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3858 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3859 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3860 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3861 functions are of good quality).
3862
3863 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3864 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3865 algorithms to break.
3866
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003867- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3868 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3869 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3870 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3871 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3872 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3873 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3874 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3875 order.
3876
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003877- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3878 operation along the most common code paths.
3879
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003880- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3881 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3882
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003883- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3884 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3885 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3886 {}.update(UserDict())
3887
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003888- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3889 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3890 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3891 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3892 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3893 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3894 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3895 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3896
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003897- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003898 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003900 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003901 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3902 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003903 join() method of strings
3904 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003905 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3906 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003908 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003909
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003910- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3911 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3912
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003913- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3914 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3915
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003916- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3917 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3918 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3919 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3920
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003921- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3922 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003923 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003924 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3925 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003926
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003927- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3928
3929
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003930Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003932
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003933- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003934 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003935 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3936 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3937
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003938- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3939 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3940
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003941- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3942 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3943 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3944 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3945
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003946- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3947 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3948 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3949
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003950- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3951
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003952- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3953
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003954- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3955 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3956 that are still imported into string.py).
3957
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003958- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3959
3960- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3961 Now it does.
3962
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003963- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3964
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003965- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3966 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3967 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3968 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3969 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003970 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3971 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003972
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003973- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3974 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3975 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3976 'help(object)'.
3977
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003978Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003979-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003980
3981- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003982 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003983 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3984 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3985
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003986- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003987 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3988 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003989
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003990C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003992
3993- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3994 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995
3996----
3997
3998**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**