blob: 42ef277c3d37f9119f374ec5463dd64cfccd2864 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000013- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
14 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
15
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000016- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000017 an ferror() call.
18
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000019- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
20 list.sort().
21
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000022- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
23 (2+3) --> (5).
24
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000025- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
26
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000027- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
28 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000030- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
31 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
32 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034Extension Modules
35-----------------
36
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000037- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
38
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000039- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
40 {remove_history,replace_history}
41
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000042- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
43 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000044
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000045- stat_float_times is now True.
46
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000047- array.array objects are now picklable.
48
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000049- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
50 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
51
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000052- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
53 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
54 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
55
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000056- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
57 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000058
59Library
60-------
61
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000062- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
63
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000064- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
65
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000066- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
67
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000068- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
69 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
70 be exploited in various ways.
71
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000072- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
73
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000074- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
75
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000076- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
77
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000078- Enhancements to the csv module:
79
80 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
81 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
82 PEP 305.
83 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
84 reporting.
85 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
86 dictates.
87 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000088 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000089 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000090 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
91 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000092 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
93 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000094 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000095 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
96 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
97 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
98 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
99 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
100 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
101 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
102 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
103 without first creating a dialect class.
104 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
105 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
106 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000107 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000108 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
109 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000110 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
111 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
112 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
113 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000114 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
115 This has been fixed.
116
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000117- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
118 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
119 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
120 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
121
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000122- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
123
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000124- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
125 (Bug #951915).
126
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000127- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
128 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
129 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
130 encoding alias table
131
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000132- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
133
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000134- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
135 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
136
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000137- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
138
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000139- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
140
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000141- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
142
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000143- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
144
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000145- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
146
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000147- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
148 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
149 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
150
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000151- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000152 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000154- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
155 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
156 tokenizer with very long source lines.
157
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000158- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
159 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
160
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000161- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
162 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000163
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000164- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
165 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
166
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000167Build
168-----
169
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000170- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
171 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
172
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000173- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
174 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
175 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
176 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
177 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
178 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
179 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
180 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
181
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000182- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
183 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
184 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
185 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
186
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000187
188C API
189-----
190
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000191- Removed PyRange_New().
192
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000193
194Tests
195-----
196
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000197- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000198
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000199
200Documentation
201-------------
202
203- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
204 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
205 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
206
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207Mac
208---
209
210
211
212Tools/Demos
213-----------
214
215
216
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000217What's New in Python 2.4 final?
218===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000219
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000220*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000221
222Core and builtins
223-----------------
224
225- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
226 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
227 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
228
229
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000230What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
231==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000232
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000233*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000234
235Core and builtins
236-----------------
237
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000238- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
239 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
240 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
241
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000242
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000243Library
244-------
245
246- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
247 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
248 raised is re-raised.
249
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000250- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
251 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
252
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000253- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
254 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
255 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
256 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
257 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
258 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
259 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
260 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
261 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
262 by the slice are recomputed now.
263
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000264- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000265
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000266Build
267-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000268
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000269- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
270 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
271 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000272
273C API
274-----
275
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000276- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
277
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000278
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000279What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
280================================
281
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000282*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000283
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000284License
285-------
286
287The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
288is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
289changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
290Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
291intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
292durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
293the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
294License::
295
296 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
297
298says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
299to Python 2.1.1.
300
301The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
302License Version 2.
303
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000304Core and builtins
305-----------------
306
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000307- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
308 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
309 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
310 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
311 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
312 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
313 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
314 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
315 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
316 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
317
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000318- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000319
320Extension Modules
321-----------------
322
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000323- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
324 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
325 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
326 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000327
328Library
329-------
330
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000331- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
332 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
333 returned.
334
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000335- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
336
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000337- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
338 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
339
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000340- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
341
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000342- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
343 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000344
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000345- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
346
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000347- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
348
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000349- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000350 the source code is updated and reloaded.
351
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000352Build
353-----
354
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000355- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000356
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000357What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
358================================
359
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000360*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000361
362Core and builtins
363-----------------
364
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000365- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000366 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
367
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000368- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
369 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
370 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
371 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
372
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000373- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
374 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
375
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000376- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
377 constant.
378
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000379- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
380 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
381 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
382 large), and to anomalies such as
383 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
384 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
385 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
386 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000387
388Extension modules
389-----------------
390
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000391- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
392 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000393 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
394 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
395 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000396
397Library
398-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000399
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000400- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000401 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000402 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
403 --swig-cpp.
404
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000405- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
406 it is set.
407
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000408- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000409
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000410- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
411 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
412 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
413 Closes bug #1039270.
414
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000415- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000416
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000417 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000418 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
419 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
420 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
421 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
422 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
423 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
424 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
425 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
426 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
427 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
428 + Updates to documentation.
429
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000430- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
431 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
432 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
433 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
434
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000435- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000436
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000437- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
438 applications should use the getmember function.
439
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000440- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
441
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000442- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
443 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
444 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
445 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
446 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
447 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
448 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
449 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
450 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
451
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000452- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
453 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000454 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000455
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000456- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
457 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
458 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
459 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
460 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
461 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
462 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
463 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000464
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000465- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
466 the new public features (of which there are many).
467
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000468- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000469 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
470 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
471 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
472 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000473 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000474
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000475- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
476
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000477- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
478 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
479 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
480 options.
481
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000482- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
483 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
484 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
485 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
486 conditions under which non-string values work.
487
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000488Build
489-----
490
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000491- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
492 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
493 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
494
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000495- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
496 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
497 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
498 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
499 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000500
501C API
502-----
503
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000504- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
505 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
506
507- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
508
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000509- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
510 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
511 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
512 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
513 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
514 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
515 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
516 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
517 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
518
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000519- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
520
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000521- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
522 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
523 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000524
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000525Tests
526-----
527
528- test__locale ported to unittest
529
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000530Mac
531---
532
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000533- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
534 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
535 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000536
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000537Tools/Demos
538-----------
539
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000540- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
541 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
542 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
543 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
544 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000545
546
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000547What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
548=================================
549
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000550*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000551
552Core and builtins
553-----------------
554
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000555- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000556 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
557
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000558- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
559 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
560 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
561 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
562 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
563 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
564 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
565 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000566 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
567 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
568 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
569 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
570 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000571
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000572- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
573 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
574 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
575 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
576 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
577
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000578- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
579
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000580- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
581 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
582
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000583- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
584 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
585 modified the list.
586
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000587- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
588 functions is now writable.
589
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000590- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
591 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
592 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
593 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
594
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000595- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
596 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
597 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
598 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
599 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000600
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000601- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
602 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
603
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000604Extension modules
605-----------------
606
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000607- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
608
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000609- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
610 data.
611
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000612- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
613 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
614 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
615 supposed to have been truncated away.
616
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000617- Added socket.socketpair().
618
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000619- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
620 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
621
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000622- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000623 versions of Python, have now been removed.
624
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000625Library
626-------
627
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000628- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000629 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000630
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000631- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
632 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
633
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000634- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
635 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
636
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000637- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
638
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000639- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
640 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000641
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000642- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
643 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
644
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000645- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
646
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000647- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
648
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000649- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
650
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000651- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
652 Percivall.
653
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000654- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
655 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
656
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000657- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
658 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
659 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000660 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000661
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000662- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
663 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
664 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
665 and exponent.
666
667- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
668
669- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
670 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
671 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
672
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000673- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
674 to the readline module.
675
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000676- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000677 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
678 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000679
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000680- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
681 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
682 contains symlinks.
683
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000684- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
685 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
686
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000687- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
688 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
689 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
690
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000691- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
692 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
693 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
694 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
695 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
696 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
697 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
698 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
699 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
700 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
701 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
702 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
703 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
704
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000705- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
706
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000707Tools/Demos
708-----------
709
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000710- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
711 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
712
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000713- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
714
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000715Build
716-----
717
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000718- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
719 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
720 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
721 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
722 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
723 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
724 plans to do so.
725
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000726- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
727 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
728
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000729- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
730 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
731
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000732- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
733 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
734
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000735- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
736 GNU/k*BSD systems.
737
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000738- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
739 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
740
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000741C API
742-----
743
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000744..
745
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000746Documentation
747-------------
748
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000749- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
750 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
751
752- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
753 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
754 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000755
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000756New platforms
757-------------
758
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000759- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
760
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000761Tests
762-----
763
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000764..
765
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000766Windows
767-------
768
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000769- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
770 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
771 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
772 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
773 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
774 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
775 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
776 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
777 the problem.
778
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000779Mac
780---
781
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000782..
783
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000784
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000785What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
786=================================
787
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000788*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000789
790Core and builtins
791-----------------
792
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000793- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
794 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
795 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
796 sensitive code.
797
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000798- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000799 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000800
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000801 @staticmethod
802 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000803
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000804 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000805
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000806- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
807 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
808 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
809 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
810 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
811 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
812 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
813 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
814 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
815 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
816 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
817
818 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
819 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
820 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
821 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
822 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
823 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
824 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
825
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000826- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
827 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
828
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000829- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000830 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000831
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000832- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000833 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000834 which was missing for no apparent reason.
835
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000836- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000837 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
838 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
839
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000840- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
841 types that support garbage collection.
842
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000843- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
844
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000845- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
846 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
847 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
848 Jython.
849
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000850- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
851
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000852- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
853 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
854
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000855- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
856 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
857 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000858
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000859- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
860 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
861 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
862
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000863Extension modules
864-----------------
865
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000866- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
867
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000868Library
869-------
870
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000871- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
872 TIS-620
873
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000874- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
875 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
876 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
877 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
878 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
879 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
880 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
881 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
882 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
883 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
884
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000885- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
886
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000887- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
888 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
889 same as when the argument is omitted).
890 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
891
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000892- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
893
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000894- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
895 schemes are offered.
896
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000897- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
898
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000899- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
900 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
901 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
902
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000903- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
904
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000905- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
906 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
907
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000908- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
909 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
910 when dummy_threading is being used.
911
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000912- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
913 from a tarfile.
914
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000915- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000916 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000917
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000918- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
919 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
920 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
921 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
922
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000923- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
924 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
925
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000926- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
927 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
928 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
929 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
930 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
931 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
932 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
933 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
934 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
935 by some other method in progress).
936
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000937- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
938 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
939 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000940
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000941- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
942
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000943- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
944 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
945 AM Kuchling.
946
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000947- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
948 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
949 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
950
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000951- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
952 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
953 instead of unsigned.
954
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000955- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000956 no longer part of the public API.
957
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000958- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
959 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
960 string methods of the same name).
961
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000962- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000963 SF patch 945642.
964
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000965- doctest unittest integration improvements:
966
967 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
968
969 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
970 DocTestSuites.
971
972- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
973 that provide thread-local data.
974
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000975- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
976 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
977
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000978- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
979
980- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
981 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
982 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
983
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000984- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
985
986 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
987 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
988 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000989
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000990 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
991 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
992 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
993 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
994
995 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
996 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
997
998 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
999 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1000 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1001 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1002
1003 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1004 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1005 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1006 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1007 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1008
1009 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1010 wrapping help output.
1011
1012 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1013 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1014 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001015
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001016C API
1017-----
1018
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001019- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1020 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1021 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1022 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1023 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1024 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1025 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1026 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1027 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1028 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1029 its visible semantics have not changed.
1030
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001031- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1032 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1033
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001034Documentation
1035-------------
1036
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001037- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001038
1039 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001040 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001041
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001042 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001043
1044 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1045
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001046- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001047
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001048Tests
1049-----
1050
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001051- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001052 platforms that use the Makefile.
1053
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001054- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1055 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1056 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1057
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001058
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001059What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1060=================================
1061
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001062*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001063
1064Core and builtins
1065-----------------
1066
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001067- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1068 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1069 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1070 objects now (one object instead of three).
1071
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001072- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1073 Windows DLLs.
1074
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001075- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1076 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001077
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001078- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1079 a new .pyc magic.
1080
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001081- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1082 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1083 be there.
1084
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001085- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1086 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1087 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1088
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001089- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1090 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1091 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1092
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001093- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1094
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001095- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1096 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1097 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001098
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001099- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1100 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1101
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001102- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1103
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001104- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001105 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001106
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001107- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1108
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001109- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1110
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001111- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1112 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1113
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001114- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1115 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1116 Fixes bug #858016 .
1117
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001118- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1119 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1120 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1121
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001122- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1123 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1124 improves their performance (about 35%).
1125
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001126- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1127 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1128 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1129
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001130- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1131 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1132 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1133 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1134
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001135- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1136 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1137 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1138 length is not known).
1139
1140- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1141 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001142 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1143 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001144 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1145
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001146- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1147 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1148
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001149- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1150 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1151 keyword arguments.
1152
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001153- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1154 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1155 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1156
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001157- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1158 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1159 cases.
1160
1161- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1162 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1163 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1164 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1165 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1166 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1167 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1168 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1169 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1170 a release build.
1171
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001172- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1173 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1174
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001175- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001176 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001177
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001178- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1179 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1180 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1181 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1182 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1183 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1184 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1185 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1186 destroyed.
1187
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001188- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1189 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1190 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1191 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1192 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1193 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1194 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1195 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1196
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001197- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1198 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1199 character other than a space.
1200
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001201- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1202 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1203 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1204 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1205 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1206 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1207 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1208 attributes with the same name.
1209
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001210- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1211 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1212 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1213 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1214 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1215 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1216 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1217 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1218 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1219 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1220 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1221 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1222 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1223 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001224
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001225- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1226 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1227 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1228 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1229 This has been repaired.
1230
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001231- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1232
1233- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1234
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001235- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1236 over a sequence.
1237
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001238- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001239 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001240
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001241- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1242
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001243- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1244 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1245 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1246 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1247 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1248 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1249 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1250 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1251
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001252- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1253 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1254 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1255
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001256- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1257 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1258 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1259 freelist.
1260
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001261- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1262 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1263
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001264- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1265 number.
1266
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001267- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1268 a TypeError exception.
1269
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001270- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1271 820195.
1272
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001273- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1274 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1275 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1276
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001277- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001278 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1279 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001280
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001281- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1282 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1283 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1284
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001285- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1286 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001287 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001288
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001289- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001290 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1291 the first call.
1292
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001293
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001294Extension modules
1295-----------------
1296
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001297- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1298 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1299
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001300- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1301 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1302 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1303 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1304 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1305 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1306 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001307
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001308- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1309
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001310- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1311
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001312- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1313 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1314
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001315- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1316 fewer false positives.
1317
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001318- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1319 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1320
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001321- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001322 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1323
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001324- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001325 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001326 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001327 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1328 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001329
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001330- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1331 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1332 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1333 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1334
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001335- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1336 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1337 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1338 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1339 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1340 #897625.
1341
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001342- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1343 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1344
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001345- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1346 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1347 and pops on either side of the deque.
1348
1349- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1350 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1351
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001352- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1353 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1354 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1355 other functions that expect a function argument.
1356
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001357- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1358
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001359- os.getsid was added.
1360
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001361- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1362 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1363 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1364
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001365- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1366
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001367- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1368
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001369- readline.clear_history was added.
1370
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001371- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1372
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001373- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1374
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001375- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1376
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001377- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1378
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001379- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1380
1381- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1382
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001383- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1384
1385- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1386
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001387- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1388 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1389 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1390
1391- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1392 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1393 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1394 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1395 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1396 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1397 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1398
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001399- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1400 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1401 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1402 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001403
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001404- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001405 iterators from a single iterable.
1406
1407- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1408 of raising a TypeError exception.
1409
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001410- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1411 as parameter.
1412
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001413Library
1414-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001415
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001416- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1417 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1418 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001419
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001420- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1421 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1422 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001423
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001424- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001425
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001426- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1427 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001428
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001429- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1430 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1431
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001432- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1433
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001434- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001435 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001436
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001437- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001438 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001439
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001440- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1441
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001442- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1443 on cygwin and mingw32.
1444
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001445- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1446
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001447- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1448 module.
1449
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001450- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1451 installation scheme for all platforms.
1452
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001453- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001454 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001455
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001456- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1457 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1458 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1459
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001460- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1461 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1462 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1463
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001464- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1465
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001466- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1467
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001468- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1469 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1470
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001471- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1472 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1473 type pattern with the same value exists.
1474
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001475- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1476 when run from the command prompt).
1477
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001478- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1479 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1480
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001481- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1482 default sort).
1483
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001484- Added global runctx function to profile module
1485
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001486- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1487
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001488- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1489
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001490- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1491
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001492- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001493 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1494 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1495 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1496 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1497 accordingly.
1498
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001499- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1500 decoding standards.
1501
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001502- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1503 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1504 called for all requests.
1505
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001506- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1507 they are passed to the compiler.
1508
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001509- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1510 indent, width and depth.
1511
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001512- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1513 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1514
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001515- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1516 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1517
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001518- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1519
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001520- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1521
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001522- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1523
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001524- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1525 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1526
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001527- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001528 for better performance.
1529
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001530- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001531
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001532- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1533 a string).
1534
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001535- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1536
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001537- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1538
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001539- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1540
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001541- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1542
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001543- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1544 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1545 list of fieldnames.
1546
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001547- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1548 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1549
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001550- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1551
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001552- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1553 empty lists.
1554
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001555- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1556 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1557 and shelves.
1558
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001559- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1560 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1561
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001562- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001563 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1564 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001565
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001566- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1567 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001568 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001569
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001570- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001571 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1572 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1573
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001574- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1575 and removed in Py2.4.
1576
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001577- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1578
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001579- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1580
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001581Tools/Demos
1582-----------
1583
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001584- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1585 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1586
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001587- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1588
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001589- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1590 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1591 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1592 destination in situations where both files are given.
1593
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001594- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1595 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1596 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1597 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1598
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001599- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1600
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001601- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1602 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1603 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1604 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1605 now.
1606
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001607- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1608 in effect
1609
1610- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1611 C-c C-h
1612
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001613- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1614 -d option was given.
1615
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001616Build
1617-----
1618
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001619- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1620 build under OS X.
1621
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001622- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1623 --enable-profiling.
1624
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001625- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1626 is configured --with-tsc.
1627
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001628- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1629 on AMD64.
1630
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001631- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1632 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1633
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001634- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1635 removed.
1636
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001637- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1638 supported (see PEP 11).
1639
1640- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1641
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001642- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1643
1644- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1645 (see PEP 11).
1646
1647- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1648 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1649
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001650C API
1651-----
1652
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001653- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1654 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1655 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1656
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001657- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1658 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1659 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1660 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1661
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001662- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1663 generator objects.
1664
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001665- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1666 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001667 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1668 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001669
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001670- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1671 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1672
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001673- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1674 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1675 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1676 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1677 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1678
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001679- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1680 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1681 about 10% faster.
1682
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001683- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1684 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1685
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001686- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1687 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1688 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1689 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1690
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001691Windows
1692-------
1693
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001694- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1695 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1696 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1697 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1698
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001699- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1700 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1701 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1702
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001703
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001704What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1705===============================
1706
1707*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1708
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001709IDLE
1710----
1711
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001712- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1713 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1714 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1715 context-menu actions.
1716
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001717- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1718 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1719 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1720 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1721 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1722 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1723 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1724 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1725 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1726
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001727
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001728What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1729=============================================
1730
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001731*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001732
1733Core and builtins
1734-----------------
1735
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001736- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001737 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001738 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1739
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001740Extension modules
1741-----------------
1742
1743- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1744 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1745 than once. This has been fixed.
1746
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001747- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1748 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1749 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1750 call.
1751
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001752- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1753
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001754Library
1755-------
1756
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001757- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1758 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1759
1760- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1761 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1762 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1763 restored.
1764
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001765IDLE
1766----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001767
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001768- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001769
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001770Build
1771-----
1772
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001773- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1774 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1775
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001776C API
1777-----
1778
1779Windows
1780-------
1781
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001782- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1783 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1784
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001785- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1786
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001787Mac
1788---
1789
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001790- Various fixes to pimp.
1791
1792- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1793
1794- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1795 more problems than it solves.
1796
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001797
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001798What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1799=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001800
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001801*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1802
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001803Core and builtins
1804-----------------
1805
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001806- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1807 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1808
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001809- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1810 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001811 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001812
1813- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1814 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1815 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001816 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001817
1818- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1819 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1822 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1823 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1824
1825- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826 770247.
1827
1828- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001829
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001830Extension modules
1831-----------------
1832
1833- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1834 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1835
1836- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1837
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001838- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1839
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001840- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1841 contained within the _strptime module.
1842
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001843- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1844 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1845
1846- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001847 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1848
1849- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1850 the find_class attribute, if present.
1851
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001852- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001853
1854 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1855 (SF bug 763298).
1856
1857 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001858 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1859 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1860 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001861
1862 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1863
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001864Library
1865-------
1866
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001867- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1868
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001869- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1870 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1871 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1872 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1873 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1874 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1875 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1876 or Tester().
1877
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001878- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1879 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1880 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1881 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1882 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1883 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1884 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1885 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1886 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001887
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001888 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001889
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001890- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1891 weren't before was an oversight.
1892
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001893- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1894 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1895
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001896- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1897 when there are no lines.
1898
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001899- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1900 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1901
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001902- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1903 to child processes.
1904
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001905- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1906
1907- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1908
1909- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1910 xmlrpclib.
1911
1912- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1913 responses.
1914
1915- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1916 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1917
1918- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1919 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1920 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1921
1922- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1923 used as patterns.
1924
1925- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1926 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1927 than Tk 8.3.
1928
1929- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1930
1931- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001932
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001933Tools/Demos
1934-----------
1935
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001936- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1937
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001938- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1939
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001940- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001941
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001942Build
1943-----
1944
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001945- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1946
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001947- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1948
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001949- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1950 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001951
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001952- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1953 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1954 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001955
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001956C API
1957-----
1958
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001959- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1960 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1961
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001962Windows
1963-------
1964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001965- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1966 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1967 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1968 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1969 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1970 Python exception ::
1971
1972 thread.error: can't start new thread
1973
1974 is raised now.
1975
1976- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1977 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1978 instead of from DLL teardown.
1979
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001980Mac
1981---
1982
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001983- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001984 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001985 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1986 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1987 the executable in the bundle.
1988
1989- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001990
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001991- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1992
1993- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1994 on Panther.
1995
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001996What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1997================================
1998
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001999*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002000
2001Core and builtins
2002-----------------
2003
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002004- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2005 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2006 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2007 with the -i option.
2008
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002009- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2010 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2011
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002012- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2013 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2014
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002015- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2016 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2017 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2018 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2019 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2020 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2021 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2022 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2023 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2024 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2025 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2026 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2027 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002028
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002029- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2030 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2031 embedded in a lambda expression.
2032
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002033- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2034 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2035 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2036 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2037 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2038
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002039- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2040 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2041 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2042
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002043- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2044 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2045
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002046- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2047 It's writable again.
2048
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002049- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2050 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2051 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002052 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002053
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002054- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2055 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2056 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2057
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002058Extension modules
2059-----------------
2060
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002061- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2062 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2063
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002064- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2065 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2066 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2067 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2068
2069- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2070 collection.
2071
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002072- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2073 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2074 unique within a single program run.
2075
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002076- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2077 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2078
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002079- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2080 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2081
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002082- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2083 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002084
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002085- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2086
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002087- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2088 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2089
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002090- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2091 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2092 for many BSD-derived systems.
2093
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002094
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002095Library
2096-------
2097
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002098- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2099 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2100 primary ones:
2101
2102 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2103 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2104 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2105
2106 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2107 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2108 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2109 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2110 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2111 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2112
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002113- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2114 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2115 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2116 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2117 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2118 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2119 argument.
2120
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002121- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2122 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2123 in the archive.
2124
2125- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2126 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2127
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002128- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2129 569574).
2130
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002131- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2132 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2133 no more.
2134
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002135- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2136 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2137 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2138 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2139 code coverage.
2140
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002141- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2142 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2143 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002144 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2145 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002146
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002147- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2148 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2149 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002150 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002151
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002152- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2153
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002154- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2155 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2156 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2157 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2158
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002159- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2160 handling.
2161
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002162- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2163 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2164
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002165- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2166 in socket.py.
2167
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002168- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2169
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002170- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2171 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2172 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2173 opener with proxy support.
2174
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002175- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2176
2177- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2178
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002179Tools/Demos
2180-----------
2181
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002182- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2183
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002184- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2185
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002186- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2187 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002188
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002189- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2190 files.
2191
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002192Build
2193-----
2194
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002195- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002196 different root directory.
2197
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002198C API
2199-----
2200
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002201- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2202 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2203 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2204 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2205 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2206 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2207 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2208 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2209 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2210 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2211
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002212- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2213 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2214 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2215 from Python.
2216
2217
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002218New platforms
2219-------------
2220
2221None this time.
2222
2223Tests
2224-----
2225
2226- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2227 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2228
2229Windows
2230-------
2231
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002232- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2233
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002234- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2235 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2236 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2237 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2238 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2239 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2240 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2241 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2242 that's what it's for.
2243
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002244Mac
2245---
2246
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002247- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2248 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2249 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2250 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002251- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2252 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2253- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002254
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002255SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2256------------------------------------
2257
2258430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2259598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2260622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2261661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2262683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2263697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2264713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2265724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2266727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2267729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2268730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2269731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2270732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2271733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2272735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2273740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2274744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2275745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2276747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2277749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2278751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2279753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2280755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2281757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2282760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2283
2284
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002285What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2286================================
2287
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002288*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002289
2290Core and builtins
2291-----------------
2292
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002293- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2294 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2295
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002296- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2297 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2298 and cannot be strings).
2299
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002300- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2301 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2302 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2303 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2304
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002305- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2306 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2307 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2308 Python itself.
2309
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002310- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2311 the referenced object, if it has one.
2312
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002313- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2314 the thread started at
2315 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2316
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002317- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2318 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2319 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2320 placed on a list index.
2321
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002322- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2323 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2324 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2325 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2326
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002327- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2328 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2329 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2330 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2331 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2332 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2333 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2334
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002335- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2336 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2337 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2338 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2339 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2340
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002341- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2342 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002343
2344- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2345 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2346 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2347 #693195.)
2348
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002349- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2350 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002351
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002352- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002353 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002354 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2355 interpreter executions, would fail.
2356
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002357- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002358 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002359 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002360
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002361Extension modules
2362-----------------
2363
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002364- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2365 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2366 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2367 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2368
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002369- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2370 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2371
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002372- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2373 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2374 and Greg Chapman.)
2375
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002376- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2377 recursively.
2378
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002379- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002380 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2381 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2382 leaks.
2383
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002384- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2385
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002386- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2387 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2388 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2389 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2390 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2391 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2392 #705836.
2393
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002394- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002395 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2396
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002397- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2398 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2399 See SF bug #692416.
2400
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002401- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2402 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2403
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002404- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2405 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2406 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002407
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002408- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002409 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2410 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2411
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002412- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2413 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2414 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2415 timeouts to work properly.
2416
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002417Library
2418-------
2419
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002420- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2421 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2422 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2423 future release.
2424
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002425- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2426 for querying platform dependent features.
2427
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002428- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002429
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002430- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2431 pickle protocol versions.
2432
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002433- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2434 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2435 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2436
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002437- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2438
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002439- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2440 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2441 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2442 modules.
2443
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002444- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2445 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2446 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2447
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002448- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2449 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2450
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002451- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2452 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2453 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2454
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002455- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002456 MS Office extensions.
2457
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002458- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2459 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2460
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002461- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2462 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2463
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002464- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2465 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2466 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2467 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2468 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2469 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2470
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002471- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2472 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2473 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002474
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002475- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2476 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2477 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2478
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002479- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2480
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002481- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2482 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2483 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2484
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002485Tools/Demos
2486-----------
2487
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002488- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2489 See the module docstring for details.
2490
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002491Build
2492-----
2493
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002494- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2495 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002496
2497C API
2498-----
2499
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002500- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2501
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002502- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2503 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2504 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2505
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002506- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2507 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002508
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002509 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2510 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2511 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002512
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002513- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002514 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2515
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002516- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2517 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2518 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002519
2520New platforms
2521-------------
2522
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002523None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002524
2525Tests
2526-----
2527
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002528- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2529 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002530
2531Windows
2532-------
2533
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002534- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2535 function.
2536
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002537- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2538 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002539
2540Mac
2541---
2542
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002543- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2544 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002545
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002546- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2547 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002548
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002549- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2550 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2551 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002552
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002553- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002554 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2555 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002556
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002557- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2558 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002559
2560
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002561What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2562=================================
2563
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002564*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002565
2566Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002567-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002568
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002569- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2570 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2571 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2572
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002573- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2574 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2575 (SF patch #664376.)
2576
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002577- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2578 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2579 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2580 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2581 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2582 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002583 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002584
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002585- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2586 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2587 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2588 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002589 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002590
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002591- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2592 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2593 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2594 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2595 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2596 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2597 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2598 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2599 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2600 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2601 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2602
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002603- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2604 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2605 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2606 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2607 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2608 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2609
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002610- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2611 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2612
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002613- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2614 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2615 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2616 case.)
2617
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002618- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2619 passed as unicode strings.
2620
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002621- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2622 See SF bug #683467.
2623
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002624- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2625 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2626
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002627- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2628
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002629- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2630
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002631- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2632 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2633 arguments.
2634
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002635- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2636 See SF bug #667147.
2637
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002638- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002639 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002640 See SF bug #676155.
2641
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002642- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002643 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002644 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2645 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2646 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2647 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2648 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2649 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002650
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002651Extension modules
2652-----------------
2653
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002654- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2655 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2656 tp_as_number pointer.
2657
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002658- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2659 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2660 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2661 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2662 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2663
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002664- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2665
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002666- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2667
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002668- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002669 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002670 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2671 patch #678531.)
2672
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002673- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2674 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2675
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002676- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2677 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2678
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002679- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2680
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002681- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2682 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2683 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2684
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002685- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2686
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002687- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2688 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2689
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002690- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002691
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002692- datetime changes:
2693
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002694 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2695
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002696 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2697 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2698 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2699 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2700 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2701 now.
2702
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002703 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002704 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2705 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002706
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002707 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002708 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002709 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2710 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2711 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2712 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002713
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002714 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2715 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2716 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002717 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2718
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002719 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2720 by a later example coded by Guido.
2721
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002722 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002723 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2724 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2725 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002726 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2727 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2728
2729 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2730 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2731 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2732 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2733 tzinfo subclass instance.
2734
2735 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2736 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2737 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2738 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2739 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2740 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2741 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2742 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002743
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002744 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2745 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2746 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2747 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2748 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002749 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2750
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002751 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002752
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002753 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2754 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2755 as a naive datetime object.
2756
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002757 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2758 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2759 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2760
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002761 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2762 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2763 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2764 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2765 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2766 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2767 comparison.
2768
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002769 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2770 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2771 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2772 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002773 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002774
2775 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002776
2777 and ::
2778
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002779 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2780
2781 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2782 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2783 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2784 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2785
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002786 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2787 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2788 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2789 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2790 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2791
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002792 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2793 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002794 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2795 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002796
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002797Library
2798-------
2799
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002800- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2801 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2802
2803- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2804 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2805 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2806 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2807 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2808 See PEP 307 for details.
2809
2810- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2811 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2812
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002813- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2814 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002815 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002816 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2817 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002818 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002819
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002820- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2821 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2822
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002823- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2824 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2825 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2826
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002827- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2828
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002829- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2830 exception.
2831
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002832- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2833 class.
2834
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002835- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2836 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2837 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2838
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002839- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2840 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2841
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002842- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002843 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2844 See SF bug #659228.
2845
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002846- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2847 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2848 See SF patch #651082.
2849
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002850- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002851
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002852- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2853 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2854
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002855- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002856 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002857
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002858- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2859 DOS paths from other platforms.
2860
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002861Tools/Demos
2862-----------
2863
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002864- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2865 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2866 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2867 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2868 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2869 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2870 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2871 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2872 example:
2873
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002874 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2875 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002876
2877 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2878
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002879
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002880Build
2881-----
2882
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002883- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2884 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2885 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002886 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2887
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002888 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2889
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002890- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2891 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2892 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2893 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2894 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2895 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2896 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2897 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2898 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2899
2900- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2901 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2902 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2903 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2904
2905- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2906 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2907
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002908C API
2909-----
2910
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002911- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2912 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002913
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002914- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2915 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2916 tp_as_number pointer.
2917
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002918- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2919 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2920 (SF #681367)
2921
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002922- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2923 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2924 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2925 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002926
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002927Tests
2928-----
2929
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002930- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002931 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2932 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2933 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2934 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2935 pydoc.)
2936
2937- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2938
2939- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002940
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002941Windows
2942-------
2943
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002944- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2945 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2946 time).
2947
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002948- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2949 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2950
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002951- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2952 release without strong cryptography.
2953
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002954- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002955 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002956
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002957- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2958 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2959
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002960Mac
2961---
2962
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002963- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2964 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002965
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002966- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2967 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2968 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002969
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002970- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2971 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002972
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002973- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2974 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2975 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2976 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002977
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002978- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002979 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2980 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2981 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002982
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002984What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002985=================================
2986
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002987*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002989Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002991
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002992- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2993
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002994- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2995 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002996 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002997 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002998 a different meaning than before.
2999
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003000- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003001 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003002 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003003
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003004- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003005 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003006 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003007
3008- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3009 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3010 and deallocation.
3011
3012- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3013 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3014
3015- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3016 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3017 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3018 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3019 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3020
3021- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3022 now detected by the garbage collector.
3023
3024- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3025 [SF bug 519621]
3026
3027- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3028 identifier.
3029
3030- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3031 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3032 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3033 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3034 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3035 [SF bug 563060]
3036
3037- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3038 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3039 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3040 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3041 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3042
3043- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3044 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3045 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3046
3047- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3048
3049- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3050 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3051 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3052 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3053 state of the slots would be lost.)
3054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003055Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003056-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003057
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003058- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003059 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3060 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3061 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3062 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003063 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3064 Jython 2.1.
3065
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003066- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003067 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003068 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3069 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3070 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3071 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3072 these, see PEP 302.
3073
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003074- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3075 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3076 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3077
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003078- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3079 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3080 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3081
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003082- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3083 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3084 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3085
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003086- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3087 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3088 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3089 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3090 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3091 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3092 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3093 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3094 releases or implementations.
3095
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003096- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003097 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3098 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003099
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003100- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3101 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3102
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003103- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3104 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3105 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3106
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003107- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3108 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3109
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003110- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3111 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003112 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3113 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003114
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003115- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3116 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3117 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3118 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3119 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3120
3121 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3122 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3123 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3124 pattern.
3125
3126 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3127 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3128 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3129 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3130
3131 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3132 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3133 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3134 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3135 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3136 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3137
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003138- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3139 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3140 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3141 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3142 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3143 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3144 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3145 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003146
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003147- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3148 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3149 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3150 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3151 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003152 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3153 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3154 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3155 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3156 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3157 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3158 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003159
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003160- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3161 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3162
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003163- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3164 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3165 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3166 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3167 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3168 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3169 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3170 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3171 to Zack Weinberg!
3172
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003173- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3174 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3175 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3176 type. This has been fixed now.
3177
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003178- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3179 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3180 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3181
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003182- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3183 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3184 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3185 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3186 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3187 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3188 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3189 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003190 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003191
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003192- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3193 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3194 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003195
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003196- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3197 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3198 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3199 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3200 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3201 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3202 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3203 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003204 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003205 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3206 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3207
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003208- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3209 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3210 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3211 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3212 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3213 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3214 this.)
3215
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003216- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3217 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003218 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003219 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003220 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3221 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003222 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3223 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003224
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003225- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3226 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3227 currently running.
3228
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003229- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3230 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3231 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3232 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3233
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003234- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3235 as directory names.
3236
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003237- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3238 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3239
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003240- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3241 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3242
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003243- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003244 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3245 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003246
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003247- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3248 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3249 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3250 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3251 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3252
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003253- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3254 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3255 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3256 removed.
3257
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003258- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3259 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3260 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3261
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003262- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3263 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3264 to __debug__.
3265
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003266- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3267 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3268 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3269
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003270- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3271 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3272 deprecated now.
3273
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003274- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3275 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3276 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003277
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003278- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3279 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3280 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3281 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3282 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003283
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003284- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3285 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3286
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003287- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3288 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3289 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003290 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003291 is backward compatible.
3292
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003293- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3294 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3295 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3296 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3297 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3298
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003299- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3300 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3301 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3302 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3303 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3304 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003305
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003306- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3307 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3308
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003309- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3310 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3311
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003312- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3313 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3314 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3315 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3316 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3317
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003318- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3319 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3320 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3321
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003322- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003323 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3324
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003325- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3326 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3327 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003328
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003329- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3330 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3331
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003332- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3333 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3334 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3335
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003336- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3337
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003338Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003340
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003341- Added three operators to the operator module:
3342 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3343 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3344 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3345
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003346- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3347
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003348- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3349 archives.
3350
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003351- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3352 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3353 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3354
3355 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3356
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003357- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3358 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3359 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003360 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003361
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003362- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3363 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3364 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3365 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003366 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3367 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3368 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3369 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003370
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003371- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3372 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003373
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003374- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3375
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003376- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3377 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3378
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003379- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3380 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3381 supported.
3382
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003383- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3384
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003385- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3386 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003387
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003388- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3389 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3390
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003391- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3392
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003393- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3394 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3395
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003396- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3397 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3398 functions but callable type objects.
3399
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003400- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003401 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003402 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003403
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003404- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3405 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003406
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003407- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3408 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003409
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003410- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3411 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3412 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3413 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3414
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003415- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3416 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003417
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003418- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3419 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3420 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3421 and __imul__.
3422
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003423- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003424 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3425 is called.
3426
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003427- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3428 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3429 interpreter was compiled.
3430
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003431- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3432 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3433 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003434 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003435 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3436 1, not 2.
3437
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003438- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3439 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3440 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3441 limit.
3442
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003443- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3444 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3445 bug #623464.
3446
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003447- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3448 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3449 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3450 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003452Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003454
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003455- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3456
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003457- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3458 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3459 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3460 with Python 2.3a2.
3461
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003462- os.path exposes getctime.
3463
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003464- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003465 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003466 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003467 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003468 unit tests of floating point results.
3469
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003470- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3471 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3472 has been increased.
3473
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003474- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3475 executed.
3476
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003477- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3478 postinstallation script.
3479
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003480- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3481 test the current module.
3482
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003483- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003484 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3485 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3486 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3487 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3488
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003489- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003490 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003491 Ward's Optik package.
3492
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003493- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3494 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3495 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3496 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3497
3498- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3499 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003500 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003501
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003502- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3503 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3504 shelf are binary pickles.
3505
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003506- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3507 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3508
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003509- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3510 modules are iterators now.
3511
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003512- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3513 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3514 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3515 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3516 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3517 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003518
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003519- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3520 with their entity value.
3521
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003522- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3523
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003524- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3525 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003526
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003527- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3528 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003529 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003530
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003531- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3532 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3533 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3534 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3535 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3536 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3537 main():
3538
3539 import locale
3540 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3541
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003542- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3543 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3544
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003545- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3546 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3547 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3548 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3549 to the new standard.
3550
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003551- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3552 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3553 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3554 an extension to the database.
3555
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003556- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3557 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3558 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3559 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003560 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003561
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003562- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003563 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003564
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003565- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3566 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3567 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3568 bounded integers.
3569
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003570- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3571 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3572 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3573 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3574 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3575 in existence.
3576
3577 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3578 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3579 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3580 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3581 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3582 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3583
3584 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3585 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3586 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3587 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3588
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003589- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3590 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3591 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3592
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003593- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3594
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003595- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3596 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3597 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3598 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3599
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003600- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3601 argument.
3602
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003603- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3604 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3605 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3606 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3607 [SF patch 560794].
3608
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003609- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3610 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3611 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003612 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3613 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3614 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003615
3616- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3617 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003618
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003619- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3620 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3621 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3622 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003623
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003624- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3625 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3626 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3627 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3628 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3629
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003630- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003631
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003632- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3633
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003634- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3635 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3636 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3637 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3638 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3639 identical to None.
3640
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003641- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3642 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3643 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3644 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3645 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3646 results now.
3647
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003648- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3649 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3650
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003651- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3652 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3653 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3654 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3655 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3656 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3657 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3658 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3659
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003660- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3661
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003662- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3663 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3664
3665- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3666 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3667 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3668 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3669 and other systems.
3670
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003671- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3672 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3673 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3674 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 +00003675 work well with these.
3676
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003677- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3678
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003679- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003680 connections.
3681
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003682- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3683 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3684 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3685
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003686- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3687 sets
3688
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003689- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3690 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3691 name.
3692
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003693- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3694 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3695 passed in.
3696
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003697- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003698 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003699 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3700 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003701
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003702- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3703
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003704- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3705
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003706- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3707 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3708 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3709
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003710- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3711 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3712 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3713 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003714 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003715
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003716- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003717 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003718 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003719
3720- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3721 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3722 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3723
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003724- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003725 the value of its expression argument.
3726
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003727- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3728 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3729 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3730
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003731- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3732 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3733 skipstone browser was included.
3734
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003735- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3736 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3737
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003738Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003740
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003741- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3742 names in addition to accepting file names.
3743
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003744- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3745 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3746 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3747 still used and useful.)
3748
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003749- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3750 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3751 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3752 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003753
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003754- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3755 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3756 the generated binary.
3757
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003758Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003760
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003761- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3762
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003763- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3764 except in the hands of experts.
3765
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003766- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003767 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3768 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3769 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003770
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003771- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3772 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3773 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3774 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3775 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3776 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3777 builds.
3778
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003779- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3780 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3781 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3782 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3783 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3784 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3785 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3786 new type.
3787
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003788- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003789
3790 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3791 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3792 positive infinities.
3793
3794 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3795 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3796 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3797 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3798 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3799 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3800 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3801
3802 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3803
3804 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3805
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003806- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3807 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3808 size of the executable.
3809
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003810- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3811 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3812 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3813 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003814
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003815- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3816
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003817- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3818 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3819 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003820
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003821- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3822 well as Unix.
3823
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003824- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3825 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3826 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3827 modules in the README file for details.
3828
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003829C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003831
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003832- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3833 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003834 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003835 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003836 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003837
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003838- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3839 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3840 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3841 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3842 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3843 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003844 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003845 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3846 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3847 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3848 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3849 aligned.)
3850
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003851- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3852 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3853 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3854
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003855- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3856 level.
3857
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003858- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3859 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3860 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3861 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3862 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3863
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003864- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3865 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3866 code.
3867
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003868- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3869 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3870 adjusting for negative indices.
3871
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003872- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3873 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3874 object.
3875
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003876- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3877 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3878 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3879
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003880- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3881 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003882
3883- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3884
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003885- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3886 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3887 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3888 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3889
3890- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3891
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003892- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003893
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003894- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003895 without going through the buffer API.
3896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003898
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003899- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3900 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3901 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3902 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3903
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003904- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3905 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3906
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003907- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003908 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003910New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003912
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003913- OpenVMS is now supported.
3914
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003915- AtheOS is now supported.
3916
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003917- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3918
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003919- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3920
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003921Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----
3923
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003924- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3925 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3926 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003927
3928Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003930
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003931- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3932 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3933 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3934 bugs.
3935 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003936 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003937 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3938 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003939 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003940
3941- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003942 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003943
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003944- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3945 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3946
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003947- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3948 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003949 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003950 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3951
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003952- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3953 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3954 use files" uninstall option).
3955
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003956- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3957
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003958- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3959 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3960
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003961- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3962 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3963 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3964
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003965- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3966 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3967 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3968 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3969 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003970 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3971 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3972 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003973
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003974- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003975 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003976 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3977 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3978 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3979 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3980 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3981 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3982 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3983 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3984 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3985 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3986 work around.
3987
3988- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3989 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3990 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3991 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3992 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3993 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3994 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3995 specified with O_CREAT too).
3996
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003997Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998----
3999
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004000- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004001
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004002- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4003 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4004 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4005
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004006- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4007 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4008 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4009
4010- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4011 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4012 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4013 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4014 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4015 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4016 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4017 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004018
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004019- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4020 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4021 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004022
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004023- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4024 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4025 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4026 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4027 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004028
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004029- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4030 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4031 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004032
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004033- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4034 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004035
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004036- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4037 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4038 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4039 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4040 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004041
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004042- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4043 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4044 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4045
4046- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4047 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4048 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004049
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004050- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4051 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4052 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4053 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004054 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004055
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004056- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4057 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004058
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004059- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4060 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004061
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004062- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004063 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004064 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4065 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004066
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004067
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004068What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004069===============================
4070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4072
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004075
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004076- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4077 with a custom metaclass.
4078
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004081
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004082- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4083 are proxies.
4084
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004087
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004088- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4089 very short strings.
4090
4091- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4092 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4093 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4094 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4095 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4096
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004097Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004099
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004100- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4101 close or delete time).
4102
4103- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4104 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4105
4106- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4107
4108- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004109 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004110
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004111Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004113
4114Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004116
4117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004119
4120New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004122
4123Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004125
4126Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004129- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4130
4131- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4132 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4133
4134- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4135 deleted at process exit time.
4136
4137- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4138 in backslash.
4139
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004142
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004143- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4144 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4145 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4146
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004147
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004148What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004149===========================
4150
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4152
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004156- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4157 been extensively updated. See
4158
4159 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4160
4161 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4162
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004163- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4164 deleted!
4165
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004166- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4167 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4168 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4169 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4170 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4171
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004172- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4173
4174 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4175 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4176
4177 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4178 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4179 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4180 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4181 supported anyway.
4182
4183 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4184 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4185
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004186- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4187 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4188 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4189 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4190 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004191
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004192- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4193 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4194 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4195
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004196Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004198
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004199- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4200 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4201 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4202 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4203 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4204 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004205 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4206 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4207 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4208 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004209
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004210- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4211 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4212 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4213
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004214Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004216
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004217- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4218
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004219Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004221
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004222- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4223 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4224 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4225 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4226 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4227 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4228
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004229- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4230
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004231- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4232
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004233- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4234
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004235- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4236 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4237 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4238
4239- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4240
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004243
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004244- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4245 off a search on Google.
4246
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004249
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004250- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4251 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4252 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4253 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4254 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4255 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4256 other platforms should do likewise.
4257
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004258- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4259 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4260 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4261
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004262C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004264
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004265- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4266 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4267 producing key-value pairs.
4268
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004269- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004270 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004271 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4272 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4273 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4274 previously went unchallenged.
4275
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004278
4279Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004281
4282Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004284
4285Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004287
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004288- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4289 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004290
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004291- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4292 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4293 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4294 home.
4295
4296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004297What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004298===========================
4299
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4301
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004304
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004305- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4306 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004307
4308 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004309 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004310
4311 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4312 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004313 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004314 This needs to be documented.
4315
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004316- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4317 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4318
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004319- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4320 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4321 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4322
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004323- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4324 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4325
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004326- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4327 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4328 class forbids it).
4329
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004330- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4331 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4332 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4333
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004334- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004339- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4340 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004341 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004342
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004343- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4344 (like 1 + '').
4345
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004346Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004348
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004349- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4350 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4351 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4352 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004353 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004354 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4355
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004356- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4357 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4358 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4359 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4360
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004361- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4362 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004363 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4364 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4365 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004366
4367- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4368 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004369
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004370- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4371 bytes on its input.
4372
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004373Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004375
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004376- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004377 convenience function.
4378
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004379- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4380 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4381 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004382 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4383 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4384 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4385 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4386 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4387 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004388
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004389- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4390 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4391 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4392 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4393
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004394- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4395 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4396 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4397
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004398- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4399 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4400 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4401 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4402
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004403- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4404 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004406 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4407 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4408 new -l and -e options.
4409
4410- statcache is now deprecated.
4411
4412- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4413 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004415 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4416 time properly taken into account.
4417
4418- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4419 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4420 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4421 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4422
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004425
4426Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004428
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004429- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4430 is built with libdb3 if available.
4431
4432- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4433
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004434C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004436
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004437- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4438 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4439 PySequence_Size().
4440
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004441- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4442
4443- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4444 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4445 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4446
4447- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4448 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4449
4450- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4451 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4452
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004453New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004455
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004456- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4457 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4458
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004459- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4460 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4461
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004462- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4463
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004464Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004466
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004467- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4468 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4469
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004473Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004475
4476- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4477 removed completely in the next release.
4478
4479- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4480 OSX.
4481
4482- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4483 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4484
4485- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4486
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004487
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004488What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004489===========================
4490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4492
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004493Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004495
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004496- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004497 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004498 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004499 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4500 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004501 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4502 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004503 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4504 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004505
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004506- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4507 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4508
4509- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4510 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4511
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004512Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004514
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004515- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4516 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4517 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4518 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4519 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4520 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4521 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4522 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4523
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004524- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4525 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4526 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4527 example).
4528
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004529- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004530 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004531 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004532 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004533
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004534- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4535 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4536 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004537 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004538
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004539- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4540 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4541 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4542 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4543 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4544 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4545
4546 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4547
4548 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4549
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004550Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004552
4553- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4554
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004555- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4556
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004557- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4558 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004559
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004560- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4561 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4562 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4563 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4564 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4565 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004566 attributes.
4567
4568- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4569 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4570 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004571
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004572- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4573 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4574 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004575
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004576- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4577 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4578 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004579 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4580 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4581
4582- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4583 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004584
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004585Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004587
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004588- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4589 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4590
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004591- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4592 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4593 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4594 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4595
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004596- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4597 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4598 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4599 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4600
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004601 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4602 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4603 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4604 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4605 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4606 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4607 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4608 without losing information).
4609
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004610- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004611 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4612 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4613 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4614 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4615 module).
4616
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004617 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004618 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4619 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4620 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4621 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004622
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004623- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004624 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4625 encoding.
4626
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004627- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4628 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4629
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004631 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4632
4633- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4634 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4635 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4636 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4637
4638- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4639
4640- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4641 ON, and OFF.
4642
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004643- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4644 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4645
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004646Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004648
4649- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4650 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4651 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004652
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004653- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4654 been added: -X and -E.
4655
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004656Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004658
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004659- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4660 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4661
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004662C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004664
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004665- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4666 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4667 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4668 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4669 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4670
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004671- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4672 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4673 as long) arguments.
4674
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004675- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4676 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4677 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4678 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4679 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4680 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4681
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004682- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4683 input.
4684
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004685New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004687
4688Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004690
4691Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004693
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004694- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4695 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4696 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4697
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004698- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4699 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4700 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004701 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004702
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4704 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4705 import signal
4706 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004707
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004709 while 1:
4710 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004712 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4713 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4714 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4715 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004716
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004717
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004718What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4719===========================
4720
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4722
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004723Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004725
4726- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4727 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4728 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4729
4730- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4731 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4732 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4733 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4734 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4735 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4736 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004737
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004738- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004739 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004740 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4741 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4742 associate a docstring with a property.
4743
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004744- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4745 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4746 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4747 other built-in object types.
4748
4749- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4750 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4751 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4752 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4753 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4754
4755- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4756 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4757
4758- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4759 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004760 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004761 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4762 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4763 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4764 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4765 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4766
4767- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4768 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4769 class.
4770
4771- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4772 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4773 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4774 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4775
4776- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4777 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4778 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4779 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4780
4781- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4782 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4783
4784- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4785 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4786 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4787 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4788 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004789 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004790 with the same value as s.
4791
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004792- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4793
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004794Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004796
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004797- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4798
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004799- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4800 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4801 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4802 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4803 objects.
4804
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004805- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4806 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004807 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4808 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4809
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004810- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4811 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4812 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4813
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004814Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004816
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004817- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4818 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4819 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4820 by the instances.
4821
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004822- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4823 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4824 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4825
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004826- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4827 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4828 before the entire comparison is complete.
4829
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004830- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4831 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4832 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4833
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004834- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4835 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4836 getwriter().
4837
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004838- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4839 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4840
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004841- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004842 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4843 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4844
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004845- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4846 iterable object.
4847
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004848- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4849 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004850
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004851- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4852 authentication.
4853
4854- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4855 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004856
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004857- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004858 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4859 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4860 a sample driver.)
4861
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004862Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004864
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004865- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4866 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4867 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4868 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4869 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4870 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4871 kernel has large file support.
4872
4873- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4874 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4875 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4876 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4877 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4878
4879- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4880 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4881 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4882
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004883C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004885
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004886- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4887 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4888
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004889New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004891
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004892- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4893 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4894
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004895Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004897
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004898- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4899 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4900 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4901 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4902 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4903
4904- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4905 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4906 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4907 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4908
4909- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4910 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4911
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004912Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004914
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004915- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004916 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4917 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004918
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004919
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004920What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4921===========================
4922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4924
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004925Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004927
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004928- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4929 big to represent as a C double.
4930
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004931- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4932 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4933 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4934 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4935 restriction).
4936
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004937- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4938 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4939 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4940 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4941 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4942
4943 >>> dir([])
4944 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4945 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4946 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4947 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4948 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4949 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4950 'reverse', 'sort']
4951
4952 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4953
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004954- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004955 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4956 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4957 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4958 OverflowError exception.
4959
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004960- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004961 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004962 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4963 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4964 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4965 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4966 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004967 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4969 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4970
4971 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4972 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4973 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4974 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004975
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004976- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004977 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4978 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4979 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4980 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4981 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4982 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4983 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4984 once it is created.
4985
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004986- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4987 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4988 (key, value) pairs.
4989
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004990- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004991 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4992 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4993
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004994- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4995 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4996 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4997 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4998 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004999
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005000- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005001 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5002 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5003
5004 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5005
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005006- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005007 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5008
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005009Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005011
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005012- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005013 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5014 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005015
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005016- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5017 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5018 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5019 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5020 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5021 in this area anymore).
5022
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005023- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5024 threading.Timer.
5025
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005026- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5027 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005029- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005030 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5031
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005032- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005033 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5034 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5035 converted to Python longs.
5036
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005037- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005038 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5039
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005040- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5041 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5042 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5043
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005044Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005047- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5048 division operators as per PEP 238.
5049
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005052
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005053- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5054 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5055 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5056 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5057
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005058C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005060
5061- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005062
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005063- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5064 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005065 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005066
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5068 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005069 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005071
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005072- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005073 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5074 module:
5075
5076 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005077
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005078 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5079 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005080
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005081 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5082 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005083
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005084 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5085
5086 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5087
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005088- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005089 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5090 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5091 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005092
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005093New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005095
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005096- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5097 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5098 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5099 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5100 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005101
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005102Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005104
5105Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005107
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005108- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5109 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5110 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5111 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005112 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5113 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5114 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5115 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5116 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005117
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005118- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005119 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5120
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005121
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005122What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5123===========================
5124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5126
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005127Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005129
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005130- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5131 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5132
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005133- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5134 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5135 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005136
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005137- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5138 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5139 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5140 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005141
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005142- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005145
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005146Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005148
5149- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005150 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005151 the module docstring for details.
5152
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005155
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005156- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005157 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5158 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5159 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005160
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005161- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5162 Nick Mathewson.
5163
5164Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005166
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005167- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5168 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5169 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5170 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5171 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5172 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5173 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5174 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5175
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005176- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5177 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5178 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5179 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5180
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005181- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5182 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5183 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5184 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5185 come a long way).
5186
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005187- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5188 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5189 write filters for these warnings).
5190
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005191- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5192 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5193 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5194 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5195 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5196
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005197- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5198 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5199 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5200 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5201 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5202 older distribution.
5203
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005204Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005206
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005207- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5208 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005209 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005210
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005211- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5212 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5213 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5214
5215- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5216
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005217- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5218
5219- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5220
5221- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005224
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005225- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5226
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005227New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005228-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005229
5230C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005232
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005233- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5234 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5235 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5236 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5237 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5238 against buffer overruns.
5239
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005240- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005241 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5242 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005243 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5244 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5245 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5246
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005247- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5248 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5249 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5250 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5251 deprecated.
5252
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005253Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005254-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005255
5256- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5257 relevant is found.
5258
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005259
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005260What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005261===========================
5262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005263*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5264
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005265Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005267
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005268- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5269 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5270 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5271 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5272 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5273 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5274 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5275 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005276 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005277 repaired.
5278
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005279- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005280 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005281 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5282 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5283 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5284 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5285 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5286 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5287 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5288 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5289
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005290- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5291 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5292 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5293 leading BMO character).
5294
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005295- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5296 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5297 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5298
5299 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5300 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5301 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005302
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005303 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5304 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5305 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5306 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5307 for various simple to use conversions.
5308
5309 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5310 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5313 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5314 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5315 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5316 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5317 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5318 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5319 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5320 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5321 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5322 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5323 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5324 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5325 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5326 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005327
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005328- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5329 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5330 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005331 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005332 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005333
5334 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005335 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5336 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5337 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5338 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5339 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005340 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5341 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005342
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005343 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5344 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5345 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005346 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005347
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005348- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5349 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5350 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5351 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5352 floating arithmetic,
5353
5354 x = 9007199254740992.0
5355 print long(x)
5356
5357 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5358 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5359 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5360 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5361 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5362 functions are of good quality).
5363
5364 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5365 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5366 algorithms to break.
5367
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005368- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5369 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5370 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5371 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5372 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5373 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5374 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5375 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5376 order.
5377
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005378- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5379 operation along the most common code paths.
5380
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005381- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5382 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5383
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005384- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5385 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5386 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5387 {}.update(UserDict())
5388
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005389- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5390 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5391 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5392 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5393 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5394 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5395 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5396 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5397
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005398- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005399 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005401 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005402 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5403 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005404 join() method of strings
5405 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005406 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5407 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005409 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005410
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005411- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5412 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5413
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005414- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5415 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5416
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005417- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5418 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5419 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5420 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5421
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005422- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5423 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005424 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005425 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5426 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005427
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005428- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5429
5430
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005431Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005433
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005434- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005435 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005436 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5437 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5438
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005439- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5440 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5441
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005442- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5443 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5444 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5445 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5446
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005447- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5448 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5449 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5450
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005451- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5452
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005453- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5454
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005455- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5456 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5457 that are still imported into string.py).
5458
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005459- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5460
5461- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5462 Now it does.
5463
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005464- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5465
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005466- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5467 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5468 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5469 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5470 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005471 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5472 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005473
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005474- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5475 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5476 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5477 'help(object)'.
5478
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005481
5482- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005483 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005484 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5485 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5486
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005487- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005488 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5489 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005490
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005491C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005493
5494- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5495 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496
5497----
5498
5499**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**