blob: 9e3ffa4f4aa49039e147cbe26be25c65af043782 [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
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000013- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
14
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000015- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
16 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
17
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000018- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
19
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000020- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
21 returning None.
22
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000023- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
24 ('\') with a specific error message.
25
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000026- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
27
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000028- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
29 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
30
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000031- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000032 an ferror() call.
33
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000034- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
35 list.sort().
36
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000037- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
38 (2+3) --> (5).
39
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000040- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
41
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000042- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
43 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000045- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
46 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
47 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
48
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000049Extension Modules
50-----------------
51
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000052- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
53
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000054- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
55 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
56 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
57
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000058- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
59
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000060- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
61 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
62
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000063- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
64 file size.
65
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000066- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
67
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000068- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
69 {remove_history,replace_history}
70
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000071- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
72 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000073
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000074- stat_float_times is now True.
75
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000076- array.array objects are now picklable.
77
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000078- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
79 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
80
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000081- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
82 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
83 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
84
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000085- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
86 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000087
88Library
89-------
90
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +000091- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
92 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
93
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +000094- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
95 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
96
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +000097- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
98
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000099- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
100 to build.
101
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000102- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
103 symbolic links on Windows.
104
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000105- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
106 profile.py if available.
107
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000108- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
109
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000110- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
111 in LWPCookieJar.
112
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000113- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
114
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000115- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
116
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000117- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
118
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000119- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
120
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000121- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
122
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000123- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
124
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000125- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
126
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000127- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
128
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000129- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
130 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
131 be exploited in various ways.
132
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000133- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
134
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000135- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
136
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000137- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
138
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000139- Enhancements to the csv module:
140
141 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
142 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
143 PEP 305.
144 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
145 reporting.
146 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
147 dictates.
148 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000149 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000150 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000151 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
152 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000153 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
154 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000155 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000156 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
157 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
158 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
159 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
160 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
161 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
162 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
163 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
164 without first creating a dialect class.
165 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
166 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
167 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000168 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000169 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
170 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000171 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
172 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
173 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
174 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000175 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
176 This has been fixed.
177
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000178- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
179 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
180 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
181 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
182
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000183- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
184
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000185- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
186 (Bug #951915).
187
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000188- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
189 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
190 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
191 encoding alias table
192
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000193- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
194
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000195- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
196 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
197
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000198- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
199
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000200- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
201
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000202- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
203
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000204- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
205
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000206- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
207
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000208- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
209 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
210 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
211
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000212- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000213 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000214
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000215- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
216 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
217 tokenizer with very long source lines.
218
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000219- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
220 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
221
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000222- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
223 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000224
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000225- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
226 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
227
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000228- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
229 correctly.
230
231
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000232Build
233-----
234
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000235- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
236
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000237- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
238 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
239
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000240- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
241 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
242 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
243 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
244 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
245 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
246 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
247 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
248
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000249- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
250 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
251 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
252 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
253
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000254
255C API
256-----
257
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000258- Removed PyRange_New().
259
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000260
261Tests
262-----
263
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000264- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000265
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000266
267Documentation
268-------------
269
270- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
271 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
272 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
273
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000274Mac
275---
276
277
278
279Tools/Demos
280-----------
281
282
283
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000284What's New in Python 2.4 final?
285===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000286
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000287*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000288
289Core and builtins
290-----------------
291
292- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
293 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
294 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
295
296
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000297What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
298==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000299
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000300*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000301
302Core and builtins
303-----------------
304
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000305- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
306 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
307 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
308
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000309
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000310Library
311-------
312
313- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
314 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
315 raised is re-raised.
316
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000317- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
318 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
319
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000320- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
321 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
322 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
323 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
324 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
325 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
326 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
327 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
328 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
329 by the slice are recomputed now.
330
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000331- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000332
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000333Build
334-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000335
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000336- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
337 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
338 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000339
340C API
341-----
342
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000343- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
344
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000345
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000346What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
347================================
348
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000349*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000350
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000351License
352-------
353
354The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
355is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
356changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
357Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
358intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
359durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
360the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
361License::
362
363 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
364
365says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
366to Python 2.1.1.
367
368The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
369License Version 2.
370
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000371Core and builtins
372-----------------
373
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000374- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
375 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
376 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
377 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
378 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
379 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
380 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
381 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
382 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
383 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
384
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000385- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000386
387Extension Modules
388-----------------
389
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000390- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
391 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
392 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
393 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000394
395Library
396-------
397
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000398- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
399 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
400 returned.
401
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000402- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
403
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000404- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
405 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
406
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000407- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
408
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000409- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
410 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000411
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000412- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
413
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000414- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
415
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000416- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000417 the source code is updated and reloaded.
418
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000419Build
420-----
421
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000422- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000423
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000424What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
425================================
426
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000427*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000428
429Core and builtins
430-----------------
431
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000432- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000433 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
434
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000435- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
436 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
437 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
438 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
439
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000440- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
441 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
442
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000443- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
444 constant.
445
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000446- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
447 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
448 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
449 large), and to anomalies such as
450 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
451 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
452 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
453 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000454
455Extension modules
456-----------------
457
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000458- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
459 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000460 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
461 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
462 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000463
464Library
465-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000466
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000467- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000468 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000469 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
470 --swig-cpp.
471
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000472- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
473 it is set.
474
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000475- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000476
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000477- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
478 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
479 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
480 Closes bug #1039270.
481
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000482- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000483
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000484 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000485 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
486 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
487 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
488 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
489 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
490 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
491 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
492 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
493 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
494 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
495 + Updates to documentation.
496
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000497- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
498 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
499 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
500 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
501
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000502- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000503
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000504- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
505 applications should use the getmember function.
506
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000507- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
508
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000509- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
510 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
511 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
512 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
513 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
514 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
515 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
516 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
517 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
518
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000519- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
520 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000521 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000522
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000523- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
524 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
525 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
526 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
527 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
528 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
529 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
530 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000531
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000532- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
533 the new public features (of which there are many).
534
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000535- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000536 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
537 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
538 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
539 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000540 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000541
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000542- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
543
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000544- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
545 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
546 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
547 options.
548
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000549- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
550 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
551 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
552 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
553 conditions under which non-string values work.
554
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000555Build
556-----
557
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000558- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
559 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
560 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
561
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000562- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
563 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
564 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
565 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
566 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000567
568C API
569-----
570
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000571- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
572 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
573
574- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
575
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000576- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
577 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
578 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
579 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
580 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
581 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
582 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
583 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
584 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
585
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000586- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
587
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000588- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
589 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
590 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000591
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000592Tests
593-----
594
595- test__locale ported to unittest
596
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000597Mac
598---
599
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000600- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
601 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
602 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000603
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000604Tools/Demos
605-----------
606
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000607- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
608 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
609 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
610 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
611 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000612
613
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000614What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
615=================================
616
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000617*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000618
619Core and builtins
620-----------------
621
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000622- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000623 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
624
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000625- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
626 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
627 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
628 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
629 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
630 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
631 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
632 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000633 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
634 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
635 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
636 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
637 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000638
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000639- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
640 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
641 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
642 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
643 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
644
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000645- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
646
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000647- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
648 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
649
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000650- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
651 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
652 modified the list.
653
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000654- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
655 functions is now writable.
656
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000657- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
658 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
659 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
660 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
661
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000662- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
663 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
664 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
665 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
666 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000667
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000668- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
669 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
670
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000671Extension modules
672-----------------
673
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000674- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
675
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000676- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
677 data.
678
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000679- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
680 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
681 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
682 supposed to have been truncated away.
683
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000684- Added socket.socketpair().
685
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000686- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
687 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
688
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000689- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000690 versions of Python, have now been removed.
691
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000692Library
693-------
694
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000695- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000696 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000697
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000698- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
699 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
700
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000701- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
702 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
703
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000704- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
705
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000706- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
707 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000708
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000709- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
710 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
711
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000712- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
713
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000714- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
715
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000716- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
717
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000718- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
719 Percivall.
720
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000721- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
722 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
723
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000724- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
725 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
726 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000727 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000728
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000729- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
730 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
731 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
732 and exponent.
733
734- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
735
736- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
737 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
738 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
739
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000740- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
741 to the readline module.
742
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000743- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000744 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
745 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000746
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000747- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
748 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
749 contains symlinks.
750
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000751- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
752 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
753
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000754- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
755 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
756 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
757
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000758- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
759 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
760 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
761 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
762 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
763 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
764 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
765 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
766 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
767 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
768 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
769 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
770 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
771
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000772- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
773
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000774Tools/Demos
775-----------
776
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000777- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
778 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
779
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000780- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
781
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000782Build
783-----
784
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000785- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
786 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
787 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
788 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
789 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
790 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
791 plans to do so.
792
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000793- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
794 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
795
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000796- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
797 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
798
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000799- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
800 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
801
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000802- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
803 GNU/k*BSD systems.
804
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000805- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
806 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
807
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000808C API
809-----
810
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000811..
812
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000813Documentation
814-------------
815
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000816- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
817 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
818
819- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
820 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
821 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000822
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000823New platforms
824-------------
825
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000826- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
827
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000828Tests
829-----
830
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000831..
832
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000833Windows
834-------
835
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000836- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
837 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
838 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
839 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
840 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
841 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
842 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
843 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
844 the problem.
845
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000846Mac
847---
848
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000849..
850
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000851
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000852What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
853=================================
854
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000855*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000856
857Core and builtins
858-----------------
859
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000860- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
861 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
862 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
863 sensitive code.
864
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000865- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000866 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000867
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000868 @staticmethod
869 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000870
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000871 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000872
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000873- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
874 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
875 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
876 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
877 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
878 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
879 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
880 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
881 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
882 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
883 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
884
885 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
886 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
887 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
888 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
889 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
890 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
891 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
892
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000893- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
894 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
895
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000896- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000897 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000898
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000899- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000900 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000901 which was missing for no apparent reason.
902
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000903- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000904 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
905 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
906
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000907- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
908 types that support garbage collection.
909
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000910- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
911
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000912- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
913 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
914 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
915 Jython.
916
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000917- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
918
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000919- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
920 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
921
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000922- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
923 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
924 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000925
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000926- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
927 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
928 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
929
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000930Extension modules
931-----------------
932
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000933- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
934
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000935Library
936-------
937
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000938- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
939 TIS-620
940
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000941- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
942 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
943 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
944 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
945 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
946 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
947 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
948 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
949 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
950 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
951
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000952- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
953
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000954- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
955 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
956 same as when the argument is omitted).
957 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
958
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000959- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
960
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000961- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
962 schemes are offered.
963
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000964- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
965
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000966- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
967 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
968 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
969
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000970- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
971
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000972- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
973 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
974
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000975- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
976 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
977 when dummy_threading is being used.
978
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000979- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
980 from a tarfile.
981
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000982- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000983 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000984
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000985- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
986 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
987 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
988 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
989
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000990- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
991 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
992
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000993- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
994 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
995 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
996 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
997 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
998 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
999 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1000 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1001 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1002 by some other method in progress).
1003
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001004- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1005 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1006 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001007
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001008- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1009
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001010- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1011 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1012 AM Kuchling.
1013
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001014- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1015 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1016 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1017
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001018- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1019 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1020 instead of unsigned.
1021
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001022- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001023 no longer part of the public API.
1024
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001025- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1026 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1027 string methods of the same name).
1028
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001029- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001030 SF patch 945642.
1031
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001032- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1033
1034 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1035
1036 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1037 DocTestSuites.
1038
1039- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1040 that provide thread-local data.
1041
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001042- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1043 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1044
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001045- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1046
1047- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1048 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1049 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1050
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001051- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1052
1053 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1054 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1055 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001056
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001057 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1058 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1059 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1060 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1061
1062 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1063 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1064
1065 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1066 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1067 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1068 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1069
1070 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1071 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1072 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1073 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1074 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1075
1076 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1077 wrapping help output.
1078
1079 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1080 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1081 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001082
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001083C API
1084-----
1085
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001086- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1087 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1088 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1089 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1090 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1091 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1092 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1093 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1094 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1095 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1096 its visible semantics have not changed.
1097
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001098- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1099 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1100
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001101Documentation
1102-------------
1103
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001104- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001105
1106 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001107 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001108
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001109 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001110
1111 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1112
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001113- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001114
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001115Tests
1116-----
1117
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001118- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001119 platforms that use the Makefile.
1120
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001121- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1122 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1123 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1124
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001125
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001126What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1127=================================
1128
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001129*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001130
1131Core and builtins
1132-----------------
1133
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001134- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1135 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1136 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1137 objects now (one object instead of three).
1138
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001139- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1140 Windows DLLs.
1141
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001142- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1143 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001144
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001145- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1146 a new .pyc magic.
1147
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001148- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1149 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1150 be there.
1151
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001152- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1153 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1154 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1155
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001156- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1157 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1158 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1159
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001160- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1161
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001162- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1163 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1164 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001165
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001166- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1167 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1168
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001169- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1170
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001171- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001172 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001173
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001174- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1175
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001176- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1177
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001178- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1179 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1180
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001181- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1182 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1183 Fixes bug #858016 .
1184
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001185- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1186 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1187 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1188
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001189- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1190 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1191 improves their performance (about 35%).
1192
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001193- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1194 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1195 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1196
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001197- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1198 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1199 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1200 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1201
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001202- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1203 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001204 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001205 length is not known).
1206
1207- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1208 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001209 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1210 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001211 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1212
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001213- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1214 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1215
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001216- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1217 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1218 keyword arguments.
1219
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001220- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1221 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1222 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1223
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001224- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1225 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1226 cases.
1227
1228- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1229 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1230 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1231 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1232 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1233 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1234 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1235 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1236 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1237 a release build.
1238
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001239- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1240 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1241
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001242- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001243 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001244
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001245- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1246 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1247 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1248 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1249 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1250 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1251 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1252 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1253 destroyed.
1254
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001255- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1256 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1257 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1258 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1259 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1260 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1261 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1262 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1263
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001264- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1265 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1266 character other than a space.
1267
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001268- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1269 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1270 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1271 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1272 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1273 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1274 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1275 attributes with the same name.
1276
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001277- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1278 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1279 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1280 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1281 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1282 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1283 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1284 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1285 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1286 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1287 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1288 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1289 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1290 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001291
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001292- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1293 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1294 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1295 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1296 This has been repaired.
1297
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001298- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1299
1300- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1301
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001302- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1303 over a sequence.
1304
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001305- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001306 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001307
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001308- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1309
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001310- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1311 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1312 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1313 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1314 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1315 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1316 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1317 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1318
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001319- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1320 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1321 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1322
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001323- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1324 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1325 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1326 freelist.
1327
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001328- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1329 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1330
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001331- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1332 number.
1333
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001334- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1335 a TypeError exception.
1336
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001337- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1338 820195.
1339
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001340- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1341 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1342 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1343
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001344- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001345 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1346 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001347
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001348- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1349 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1350 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1351
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001352- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1353 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001354 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001355
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001356- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001357 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1358 the first call.
1359
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001360
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001361Extension modules
1362-----------------
1363
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001364- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1365 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1366
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001367- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1368 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1369 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1370 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1371 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1372 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1373 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001374
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001375- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1376
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001377- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1378
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001379- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1380 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1381
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001382- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1383 fewer false positives.
1384
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001385- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1386 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1387
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001388- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001389 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1390
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001391- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001392 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001393 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001394 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1395 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001396
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001397- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1398 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1399 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1400 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1401
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001402- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1403 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1404 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1405 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1406 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1407 #897625.
1408
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001409- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1410 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1411
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001412- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1413 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1414 and pops on either side of the deque.
1415
1416- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1417 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1418
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001419- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1420 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1421 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1422 other functions that expect a function argument.
1423
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001424- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1425
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001426- os.getsid was added.
1427
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001428- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1429 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1430 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1431
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001432- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1433
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001434- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1435
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001436- readline.clear_history was added.
1437
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001438- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1439
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001440- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1441
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001442- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1443
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001444- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1445
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001446- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1447
1448- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1449
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001450- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1451
1452- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1453
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001454- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1455 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1456 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1457
1458- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1459 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1460 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1461 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1462 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1463 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1464 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1465
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001466- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1467 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1468 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1469 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001470
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001471- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001472 iterators from a single iterable.
1473
1474- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1475 of raising a TypeError exception.
1476
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001477- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1478 as parameter.
1479
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001480Library
1481-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001482
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001483- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1484 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1485 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001486
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001487- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1488 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1489 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001490
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001491- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001492
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001493- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1494 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001495
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001496- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1497 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1498
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001499- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1500
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001501- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001502 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001503
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001504- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001505 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001506
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001507- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1508
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001509- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1510 on cygwin and mingw32.
1511
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001512- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1513
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001514- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1515 module.
1516
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001517- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1518 installation scheme for all platforms.
1519
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001520- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001521 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001522
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001523- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1524 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1525 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1526
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001527- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1528 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1529 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1530
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001531- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1532
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001533- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1534
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001535- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1536 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1537
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001538- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1539 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1540 type pattern with the same value exists.
1541
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001542- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1543 when run from the command prompt).
1544
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001545- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1546 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1547
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001548- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1549 default sort).
1550
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001551- Added global runctx function to profile module
1552
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001553- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1554
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001555- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1556
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001557- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1558
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001559- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001560 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1561 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1562 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1563 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1564 accordingly.
1565
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001566- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1567 decoding standards.
1568
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001569- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1570 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1571 called for all requests.
1572
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001573- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1574 they are passed to the compiler.
1575
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001576- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1577 indent, width and depth.
1578
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001579- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1580 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1581
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001582- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1583 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1584
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001585- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1586
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001587- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1588
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001589- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1590
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001591- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1592 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1593
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001594- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001595 for better performance.
1596
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001597- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001598
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001599- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1600 a string).
1601
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001602- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1603
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001604- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1605
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001606- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1607
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001608- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1609
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001610- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1611 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1612 list of fieldnames.
1613
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001614- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1615 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1616
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001617- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1618
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001619- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1620 empty lists.
1621
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001622- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1623 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1624 and shelves.
1625
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001626- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1627 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1628
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001629- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001630 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1631 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001632
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001633- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1634 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001635 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001636
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001637- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001638 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1639 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1640
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001641- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1642 and removed in Py2.4.
1643
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001644- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1645
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001646- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1647
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001648Tools/Demos
1649-----------
1650
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001651- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1652 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1653
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001654- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1655
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001656- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1657 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1658 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1659 destination in situations where both files are given.
1660
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001661- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1662 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1663 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1664 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1665
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001666- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1667
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001668- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1669 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1670 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1671 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1672 now.
1673
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001674- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1675 in effect
1676
1677- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1678 C-c C-h
1679
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001680- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1681 -d option was given.
1682
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001683Build
1684-----
1685
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001686- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1687 build under OS X.
1688
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001689- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1690 --enable-profiling.
1691
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001692- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1693 is configured --with-tsc.
1694
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001695- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1696 on AMD64.
1697
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001698- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1699 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1700
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001701- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1702 removed.
1703
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001704- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1705 supported (see PEP 11).
1706
1707- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1708
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001709- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1710
1711- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1712 (see PEP 11).
1713
1714- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1715 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1716
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001717C API
1718-----
1719
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001720- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1721 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1722 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1723
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001724- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1725 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1726 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1727 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1728
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001729- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1730 generator objects.
1731
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001732- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1733 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001734 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1735 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001736
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001737- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1738 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1739
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001740- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1741 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1742 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1743 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1744 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1745
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001746- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1747 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1748 about 10% faster.
1749
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001750- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1751 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1752
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001753- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1754 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1755 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1756 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1757
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001758Windows
1759-------
1760
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001761- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1762 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1763 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1764 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1765
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001766- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1767 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1768 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1769
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001770
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001771What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1772===============================
1773
1774*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1775
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001776IDLE
1777----
1778
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001779- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1780 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1781 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1782 context-menu actions.
1783
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001784- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1785 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1786 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1787 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1788 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1789 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1790 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1791 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1792 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1793
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001794
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001795What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1796=============================================
1797
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001798*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001799
1800Core and builtins
1801-----------------
1802
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001803- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001804 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001805 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1806
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001807Extension modules
1808-----------------
1809
1810- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1811 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1812 than once. This has been fixed.
1813
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001814- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1815 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1816 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1817 call.
1818
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001819- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1820
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001821Library
1822-------
1823
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001824- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1825 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1826
1827- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1828 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1829 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1830 restored.
1831
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001832IDLE
1833----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001834
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001835- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001836
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001837Build
1838-----
1839
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001840- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1841 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1842
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001843C API
1844-----
1845
1846Windows
1847-------
1848
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001849- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1850 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1851
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001852- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1853
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001854Mac
1855---
1856
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001857- Various fixes to pimp.
1858
1859- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1860
1861- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1862 more problems than it solves.
1863
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001864
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001865What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1866=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001867
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001868*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1869
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001870Core and builtins
1871-----------------
1872
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001873- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1874 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1875
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001876- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1877 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001878 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001879
1880- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1881 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1882 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001883 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001884
1885- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1886 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001887
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001888- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1889 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1890 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1891
1892- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001893 770247.
1894
1895- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001896
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001897Extension modules
1898-----------------
1899
1900- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1901 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1902
1903- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1904
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001905- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1906
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001907- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1908 contained within the _strptime module.
1909
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001910- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1911 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1912
1913- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001914 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1915
1916- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1917 the find_class attribute, if present.
1918
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001919- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001920
1921 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1922 (SF bug 763298).
1923
1924 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001925 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1926 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1927 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001928
1929 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1930
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001931Library
1932-------
1933
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001934- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1935
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001936- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1937 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1938 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1939 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1940 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1941 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1942 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1943 or Tester().
1944
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001945- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1946 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1947 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1948 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1949 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1950 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1951 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1952 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1953 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001954
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001955 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001956
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001957- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1958 weren't before was an oversight.
1959
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001960- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1961 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1962
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001963- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1964 when there are no lines.
1965
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001966- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1967 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1968
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001969- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1970 to child processes.
1971
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001972- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1973
1974- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1975
1976- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1977 xmlrpclib.
1978
1979- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1980 responses.
1981
1982- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1983 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1984
1985- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1986 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1987 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1988
1989- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1990 used as patterns.
1991
1992- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1993 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1994 than Tk 8.3.
1995
1996- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1997
1998- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001999
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002000Tools/Demos
2001-----------
2002
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002003- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2004
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002005- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2006
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002007- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002008
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002009Build
2010-----
2011
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002012- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2013
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002014- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2015
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002016- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2017 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002019- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2020 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2021 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002022
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002023C API
2024-----
2025
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002026- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2027 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2028
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002029Windows
2030-------
2031
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002032- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2033 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2034 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2035 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2036 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2037 Python exception ::
2038
2039 thread.error: can't start new thread
2040
2041 is raised now.
2042
2043- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2044 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2045 instead of from DLL teardown.
2046
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002047Mac
2048---
2049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002050- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002051 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002052 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2053 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2054 the executable in the bundle.
2055
2056- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002057
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002058- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2059
2060- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2061 on Panther.
2062
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002063What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2064================================
2065
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002066*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002067
2068Core and builtins
2069-----------------
2070
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002071- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2072 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2073 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2074 with the -i option.
2075
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002076- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2077 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2078
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002079- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2080 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2081
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002082- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2083 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2084 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2085 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2086 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2087 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2088 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2089 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2090 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2091 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2092 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2093 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2094 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002095
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002096- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2097 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2098 embedded in a lambda expression.
2099
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002100- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2101 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2102 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2103 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2104 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2105
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002106- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2107 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2108 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2109
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002110- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2111 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2112
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002113- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2114 It's writable again.
2115
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002116- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2117 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2118 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002119 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002120
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002121- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2122 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2123 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2124
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002125Extension modules
2126-----------------
2127
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002128- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2129 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2130
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002131- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2132 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2133 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2134 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2135
2136- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2137 collection.
2138
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002139- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2140 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2141 unique within a single program run.
2142
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002143- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2144 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2145
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002146- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2147 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2148
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002149- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2150 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002151
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002152- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2153
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002154- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2155 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2156
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002157- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2158 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2159 for many BSD-derived systems.
2160
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002161
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002162Library
2163-------
2164
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002165- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2166 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2167 primary ones:
2168
2169 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2170 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2171 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2172
2173 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2174 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2175 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2176 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2177 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2178 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2179
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002180- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2181 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2182 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2183 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2184 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2185 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2186 argument.
2187
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002188- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2189 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2190 in the archive.
2191
2192- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2193 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2194
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002195- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2196 569574).
2197
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002198- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2199 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2200 no more.
2201
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002202- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2203 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2204 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2205 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2206 code coverage.
2207
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002208- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2209 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2210 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002211 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2212 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002213
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002214- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2215 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2216 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002217 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002218
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002219- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2220
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002221- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2222 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2223 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2224 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2225
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002226- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2227 handling.
2228
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002229- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2230 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2231
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002232- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2233 in socket.py.
2234
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002235- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2236
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002237- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2238 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2239 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2240 opener with proxy support.
2241
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002242- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2243
2244- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2245
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002246Tools/Demos
2247-----------
2248
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002249- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2250
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002251- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2252
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002253- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2254 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002255
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002256- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2257 files.
2258
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002259Build
2260-----
2261
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002262- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002263 different root directory.
2264
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002265C API
2266-----
2267
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002268- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2269 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2270 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2271 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2272 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2273 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2274 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2275 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2276 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2277 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2278
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002279- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2280 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2281 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2282 from Python.
2283
2284
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002285New platforms
2286-------------
2287
2288None this time.
2289
2290Tests
2291-----
2292
2293- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2294 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2295
2296Windows
2297-------
2298
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002299- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2300
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002301- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2302 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2303 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2304 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2305 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2306 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2307 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2308 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2309 that's what it's for.
2310
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002311Mac
2312---
2313
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002314- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2315 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2316 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2317 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002318- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2319 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2320- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002321
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002322SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2323------------------------------------
2324
2325430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2326598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2327622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2328661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2329683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2330697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2331713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2332724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2333727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2334729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2335730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2336731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2337732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2338733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2339735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2340740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2341744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2342745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2343747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2344749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2345751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2346753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2347755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2348757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2349760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2350
2351
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002352What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2353================================
2354
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002355*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002356
2357Core and builtins
2358-----------------
2359
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002360- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2361 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2362
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002363- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2364 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2365 and cannot be strings).
2366
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002367- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2368 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2369 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2370 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2371
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002372- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2373 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2374 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2375 Python itself.
2376
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002377- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2378 the referenced object, if it has one.
2379
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002380- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2381 the thread started at
2382 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2383
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002384- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2385 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2386 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2387 placed on a list index.
2388
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002389- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2390 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2391 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2392 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2393
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002394- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2395 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2396 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2397 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2398 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2399 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2400 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2401
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002402- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2403 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2404 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2405 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2406 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2407
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002408- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2409 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002410
2411- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2412 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2413 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2414 #693195.)
2415
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002416- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2417 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002418
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002419- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002420 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002421 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2422 interpreter executions, would fail.
2423
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002424- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002425 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002426 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002427
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002428Extension modules
2429-----------------
2430
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002431- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2432 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2433 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2434 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2435
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002436- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2437 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2438
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002439- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2440 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2441 and Greg Chapman.)
2442
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002443- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2444 recursively.
2445
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002446- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002447 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2448 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2449 leaks.
2450
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002451- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2452
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002453- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2454 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2455 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2456 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2457 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2458 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2459 #705836.
2460
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002461- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002462 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2463
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002464- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2465 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2466 See SF bug #692416.
2467
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002468- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2469 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2470
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002471- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2472 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2473 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002474
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002475- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002476 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2477 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2478
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002479- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2480 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2481 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2482 timeouts to work properly.
2483
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002484Library
2485-------
2486
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002487- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2488 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2489 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2490 future release.
2491
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002492- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2493 for querying platform dependent features.
2494
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002495- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002496
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002497- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2498 pickle protocol versions.
2499
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002500- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2501 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2502 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2503
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002504- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2505
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002506- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2507 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2508 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2509 modules.
2510
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002511- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2512 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2513 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2514
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002515- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2516 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2517
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002518- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2519 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2520 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2521
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002522- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002523 MS Office extensions.
2524
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002525- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2526 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2527
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002528- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2529 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2530
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002531- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2532 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2533 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2534 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2535 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2536 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2537
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002538- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2539 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2540 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002541
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002542- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2543 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2544 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2545
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002546- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2547
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002548- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2549 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2550 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2551
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002552Tools/Demos
2553-----------
2554
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002555- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2556 See the module docstring for details.
2557
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002558Build
2559-----
2560
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002561- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2562 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002563
2564C API
2565-----
2566
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002567- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2568
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002569- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2570 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2571 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2572
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002573- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2574 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002575
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002576 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2577 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2578 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002579
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002580- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002581 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2582
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002583- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2584 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2585 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002586
2587New platforms
2588-------------
2589
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002590None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002591
2592Tests
2593-----
2594
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002595- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2596 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002597
2598Windows
2599-------
2600
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002601- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2602 function.
2603
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002604- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2605 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002606
2607Mac
2608---
2609
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002610- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2611 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002612
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002613- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2614 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002615
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002616- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2617 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2618 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002619
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002620- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002621 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2622 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002623
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002624- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2625 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002626
2627
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002628What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2629=================================
2630
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002631*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002632
2633Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002634-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002635
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002636- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2637 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2638 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2639
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002640- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2641 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2642 (SF patch #664376.)
2643
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002644- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2645 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2646 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2647 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2648 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2649 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002650 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002651
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002652- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2653 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2654 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2655 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002656 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002657
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002658- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2659 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2660 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2661 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2662 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2663 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2664 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2665 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2666 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2667 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2668 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2669
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002670- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2671 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2672 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2673 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2674 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2675 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2676
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002677- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2678 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2679
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002680- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2681 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2682 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2683 case.)
2684
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002685- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2686 passed as unicode strings.
2687
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002688- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2689 See SF bug #683467.
2690
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002691- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2692 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2693
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002694- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2695
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002696- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2697
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002698- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2699 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2700 arguments.
2701
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002702- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2703 See SF bug #667147.
2704
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002705- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002706 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002707 See SF bug #676155.
2708
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002709- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002710 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002711 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2712 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2713 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2714 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2715 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2716 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002717
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002718Extension modules
2719-----------------
2720
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002721- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2722 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2723 tp_as_number pointer.
2724
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002725- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2726 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2727 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2728 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2729 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2730
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002731- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2732
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002733- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2734
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002735- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002736 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002737 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2738 patch #678531.)
2739
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002740- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2741 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2742
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002743- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2744 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2745
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002746- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2747
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002748- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2749 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2750 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2751
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002752- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2753
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002754- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2755 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2756
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002757- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002758
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002759- datetime changes:
2760
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002761 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2762
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002763 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2764 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2765 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2766 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2767 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2768 now.
2769
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002770 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002771 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2772 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002773
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002774 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002775 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002776 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2777 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2778 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2779 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002780
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002781 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2782 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2783 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002784 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2785
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002786 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2787 by a later example coded by Guido.
2788
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002789 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002790 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2791 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2792 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002793 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2794 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2795
2796 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2797 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2798 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2799 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2800 tzinfo subclass instance.
2801
2802 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2803 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2804 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2805 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2806 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2807 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2808 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2809 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002810
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002811 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2812 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2813 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2814 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2815 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002816 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2817
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002818 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002819
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002820 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2821 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2822 as a naive datetime object.
2823
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002824 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2825 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2826 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2827
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002828 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2829 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2830 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2831 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2832 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2833 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2834 comparison.
2835
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002836 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2837 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2838 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2839 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002840 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002841
2842 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002843
2844 and ::
2845
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002846 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2847
2848 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2849 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2850 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2851 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2852
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002853 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2854 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2855 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2856 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2857 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2858
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002859 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2860 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002861 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2862 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002863
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002864Library
2865-------
2866
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002867- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2868 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2869
2870- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2871 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2872 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2873 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2874 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2875 See PEP 307 for details.
2876
2877- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2878 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2879
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002880- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2881 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002882 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002883 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2884 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002885 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002886
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002887- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2888 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2889
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002890- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2891 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2892 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2893
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002894- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2895
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002896- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2897 exception.
2898
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002899- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2900 class.
2901
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002902- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2903 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2904 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2905
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002906- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2907 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2908
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002909- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002910 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2911 See SF bug #659228.
2912
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002913- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2914 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2915 See SF patch #651082.
2916
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002917- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002918
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002919- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2920 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2921
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002922- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002923 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002924
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002925- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2926 DOS paths from other platforms.
2927
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002928Tools/Demos
2929-----------
2930
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002931- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2932 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2933 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2934 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2935 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2936 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2937 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2938 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2939 example:
2940
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002941 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2942 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002943
2944 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2945
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002947Build
2948-----
2949
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002950- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2951 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2952 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002953 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2954
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002955 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2956
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002957- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2958 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2959 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2960 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2961 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2962 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2963 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2964 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2965 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2966
2967- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2968 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2969 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2970 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2971
2972- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2973 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002975C API
2976-----
2977
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002978- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2979 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002980
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002981- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2982 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2983 tp_as_number pointer.
2984
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002985- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2986 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2987 (SF #681367)
2988
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002989- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2990 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2991 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2992 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002993
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002994Tests
2995-----
2996
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002997- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002998 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2999 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3000 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3001 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3002 pydoc.)
3003
3004- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3005
3006- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003007
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003008Windows
3009-------
3010
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003011- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3012 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3013 time).
3014
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003015- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3016 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3017
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003018- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3019 release without strong cryptography.
3020
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003021- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003022 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003023
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003024- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3025 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3026
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003027Mac
3028---
3029
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003030- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3031 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003032
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003033- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3034 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3035 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003036
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003037- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3038 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003039
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003040- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3041 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3042 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3043 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003044
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003045- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003046 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3047 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3048 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003049
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003050
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003051What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003052=================================
3053
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003054*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003056Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003058
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003059- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3060
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003061- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3062 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003063 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003064 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003065 a different meaning than before.
3066
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003067- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003068 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003069 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003070
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003071- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003072 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003073 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003074
3075- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3076 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3077 and deallocation.
3078
3079- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3080 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3081
3082- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3083 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3084 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3085 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3086 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3087
3088- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3089 now detected by the garbage collector.
3090
3091- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3092 [SF bug 519621]
3093
3094- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3095 identifier.
3096
3097- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3098 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3099 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3100 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3101 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3102 [SF bug 563060]
3103
3104- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3105 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3106 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3107 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3108 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3109
3110- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3111 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3112 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3113
3114- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3115
3116- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3117 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3118 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3119 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3120 state of the slots would be lost.)
3121
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003122Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003124
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003125- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003126 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3127 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3128 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3129 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003130 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3131 Jython 2.1.
3132
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003133- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003134 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003135 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3136 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3137 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3138 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3139 these, see PEP 302.
3140
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003141- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3142 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3143 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3144
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003145- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3146 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3147 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3148
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003149- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3150 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3151 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3152
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003153- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3154 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3155 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3156 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3157 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3158 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3159 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3160 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3161 releases or implementations.
3162
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003163- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003164 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3165 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003166
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003167- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3168 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3169
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003170- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3171 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3172 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3173
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003174- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3175 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3176
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003177- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3178 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003179 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3180 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003181
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003182- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3183 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3184 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3185 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3186 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3187
3188 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3189 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3190 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3191 pattern.
3192
3193 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3194 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3195 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3196 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3197
3198 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3199 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3200 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3201 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3202 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3203 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3204
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003205- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3206 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3207 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3208 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3209 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3210 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3211 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3212 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003213
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003214- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3215 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3216 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3217 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3218 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003219 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3220 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3221 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3222 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3223 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3224 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3225 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003226
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003227- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3228 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3229
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003230- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3231 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3232 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3233 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3234 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3235 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3236 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3237 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3238 to Zack Weinberg!
3239
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003240- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3241 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3242 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3243 type. This has been fixed now.
3244
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003245- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3246 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3247 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3248
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003249- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3250 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3251 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3252 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3253 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3254 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3255 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3256 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003257 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003258
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003259- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3260 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3261 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003262
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003263- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3264 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3265 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3266 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3267 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3268 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3269 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3270 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003271 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003272 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3273 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3274
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003275- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3276 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3277 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3278 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3279 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3280 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3281 this.)
3282
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003283- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3284 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003285 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003286 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003287 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3288 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003289 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3290 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003291
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003292- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3293 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3294 currently running.
3295
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003296- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3297 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3298 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3299 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3300
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003301- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3302 as directory names.
3303
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003304- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3305 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3306
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003307- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3308 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3309
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003310- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003311 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3312 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003313
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003314- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3315 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3316 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3317 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3318 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3319
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003320- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3321 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3322 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3323 removed.
3324
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003325- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3326 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3327 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3328
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003329- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3330 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3331 to __debug__.
3332
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003333- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3334 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3335 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3336
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003337- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3338 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3339 deprecated now.
3340
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003341- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3342 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3343 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003344
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003345- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3346 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3347 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3348 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3349 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003350
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003351- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3352 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3353
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003354- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3355 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3356 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003357 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003358 is backward compatible.
3359
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003360- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3361 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3362 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3363 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3364 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3365
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003366- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3367 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3368 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3369 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3370 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3371 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003372
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003373- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3374 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3375
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003376- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3377 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3378
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003379- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3380 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3381 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3382 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3383 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3384
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003385- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3386 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3387 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3388
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003389- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003390 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3391
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003392- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3393 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3394 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003395
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003396- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3397 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3398
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003399- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3400 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3401 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3402
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003403- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3404
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003407
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003408- Added three operators to the operator module:
3409 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3410 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3411 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3412
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003413- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3414
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003415- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3416 archives.
3417
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003418- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3419 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3420 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3421
3422 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3423
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003424- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3425 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3426 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003427 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003428
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003429- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3430 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3431 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3432 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003433 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3434 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3435 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3436 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003437
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003438- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3439 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003440
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003441- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3442
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003443- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3444 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3445
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003446- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3447 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3448 supported.
3449
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003450- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3451
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003452- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3453 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003454
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003455- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3456 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3457
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003458- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3459
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003460- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3461 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3462
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003463- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3464 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3465 functions but callable type objects.
3466
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003467- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003468 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003469 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003470
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003471- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3472 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003473
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003474- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3475 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003476
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003477- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3478 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3479 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3480 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3481
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003482- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3483 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003484
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003485- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3486 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3487 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3488 and __imul__.
3489
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003490- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003491 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3492 is called.
3493
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003494- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3495 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3496 interpreter was compiled.
3497
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003498- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3499 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3500 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003501 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003502 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3503 1, not 2.
3504
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003505- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3506 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3507 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3508 limit.
3509
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003510- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3511 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3512 bug #623464.
3513
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003514- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3515 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3516 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3517 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3518
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003519Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003521
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003522- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3523
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003524- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3525 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3526 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3527 with Python 2.3a2.
3528
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003529- os.path exposes getctime.
3530
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003531- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003532 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003533 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003534 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003535 unit tests of floating point results.
3536
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003537- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3538 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3539 has been increased.
3540
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003541- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3542 executed.
3543
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003544- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3545 postinstallation script.
3546
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003547- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3548 test the current module.
3549
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003550- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003551 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3552 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3553 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3554 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3555
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003556- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003557 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003558 Ward's Optik package.
3559
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003560- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3561 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3562 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3563 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3564
3565- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3566 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003567 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003568
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003569- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3570 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3571 shelf are binary pickles.
3572
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003573- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3574 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3575
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003576- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3577 modules are iterators now.
3578
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003579- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3580 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3581 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3582 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3583 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3584 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003585
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003586- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3587 with their entity value.
3588
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003589- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3590
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003591- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3592 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003593
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003594- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3595 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003596 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003597
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003598- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3599 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3600 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3601 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3602 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3603 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3604 main():
3605
3606 import locale
3607 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3608
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003609- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3610 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3611
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003612- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3613 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3614 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3615 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3616 to the new standard.
3617
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003618- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3619 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3620 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3621 an extension to the database.
3622
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003623- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3624 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3625 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3626 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003627 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003628
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003629- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003630 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003631
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003632- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3633 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3634 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3635 bounded integers.
3636
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003637- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3638 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3639 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3640 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3641 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3642 in existence.
3643
3644 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3645 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3646 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3647 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3648 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3649 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3650
3651 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3652 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3653 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3654 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3655
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003656- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3657 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3658 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3659
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003660- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3661
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003662- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3663 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3664 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3665 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3666
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003667- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3668 argument.
3669
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003670- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3671 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3672 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3673 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3674 [SF patch 560794].
3675
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003676- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3677 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3678 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003679 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3680 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3681 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003682
3683- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3684 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003685
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003686- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3687 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3688 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3689 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003690
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003691- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3692 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3693 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3694 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3695 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3696
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003697- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003698
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003699- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3700
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003701- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3702 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3703 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3704 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3705 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3706 identical to None.
3707
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003708- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3709 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3710 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3711 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3712 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3713 results now.
3714
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003715- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3716 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3717
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003718- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3719 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3720 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3721 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3722 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3723 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3724 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3725 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3726
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003727- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3728
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003729- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3730 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3731
3732- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3733 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3734 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3735 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3736 and other systems.
3737
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003738- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3739 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3740 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3741 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 +00003742 work well with these.
3743
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003744- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3745
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003746- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003747 connections.
3748
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003749- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3750 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3751 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3752
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003753- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3754 sets
3755
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003756- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3757 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3758 name.
3759
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003760- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3761 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3762 passed in.
3763
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003764- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003765 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003766 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3767 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003768
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003769- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3770
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003771- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3772
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003773- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3774 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3775 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3776
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003777- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3778 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3779 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3780 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003781 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003782
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003783- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003784 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003785 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003786
3787- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3788 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3789 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3790
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003791- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003792 the value of its expression argument.
3793
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003794- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3795 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3796 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3797
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003798- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3799 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3800 skipstone browser was included.
3801
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003802- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3803 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3804
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003805Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003807
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003808- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3809 names in addition to accepting file names.
3810
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003811- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3812 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3813 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3814 still used and useful.)
3815
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003816- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3817 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3818 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3819 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003820
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003821- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3822 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3823 the generated binary.
3824
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003825Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003826-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003827
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003828- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3829
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003830- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3831 except in the hands of experts.
3832
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003833- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003834 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3835 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3836 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003837
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003838- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3839 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3840 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3841 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3842 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3843 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3844 builds.
3845
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003846- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3847 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3848 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3849 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3850 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3851 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3852 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3853 new type.
3854
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003855- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003856
3857 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3858 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3859 positive infinities.
3860
3861 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3862 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3863 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3864 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3865 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3866 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3867 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3868
3869 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3870
3871 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3872
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003873- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3874 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3875 size of the executable.
3876
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003877- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3878 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3879 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3880 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003881
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003882- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3883
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003884- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3885 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3886 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003887
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003888- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3889 well as Unix.
3890
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003891- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3892 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3893 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3894 modules in the README file for details.
3895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003896C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003898
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003899- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3900 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003901 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003902 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003903 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003904
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003905- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3906 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3907 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3908 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3909 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3910 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003911 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003912 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3913 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3914 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3915 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3916 aligned.)
3917
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003918- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3919 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3920 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3921
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003922- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3923 level.
3924
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003925- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3926 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3927 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3928 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3929 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3930
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003931- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3932 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3933 code.
3934
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003935- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3936 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3937 adjusting for negative indices.
3938
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003939- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3940 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3941 object.
3942
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003943- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3944 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3945 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3946
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003947- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3948 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003949
3950- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3951
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003952- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3953 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3954 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3955 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3956
3957- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3958
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003959- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003960
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003961- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003962 without going through the buffer API.
3963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003965
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003966- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3967 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3968 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3969 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3970
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003971- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3972 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3973
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003974- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003975 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3976
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003977New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003979
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003980- OpenVMS is now supported.
3981
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003982- AtheOS is now supported.
3983
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003984- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3985
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003986- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3987
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003988Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-----
3990
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003991- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3992 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3993 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003994
3995Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003997
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003998- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3999 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4000 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4001 bugs.
4002 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004003 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004004 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4005 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004006 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004007
4008- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004009 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004010
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004011- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4012 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4013
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004014- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4015 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004016 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004017 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4018
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004019- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4020 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4021 use files" uninstall option).
4022
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004023- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4024
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004025- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4026 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4027
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004028- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4029 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4030 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4031
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004032- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4033 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4034 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4035 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4036 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004037 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4038 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4039 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004040
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004041- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004042 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004043 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4044 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4045 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4046 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4047 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4048 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4049 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4050 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4051 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4052 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4053 work around.
4054
4055- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4056 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4057 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4058 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4059 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4060 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4061 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4062 specified with O_CREAT too).
4063
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004064Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065----
4066
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004067- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004068
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004069- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4070 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4071 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4072
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004073- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4074 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4075 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4076
4077- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4078 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4079 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4080 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4081 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4082 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4083 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4084 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004085
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004086- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4087 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4088 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004089
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004090- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4091 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4092 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4093 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4094 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004096- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4097 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4098 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004099
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004100- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4101 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004102
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004103- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4104 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4105 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4106 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4107 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004108
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004109- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4110 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4111 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4112
4113- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4114 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4115 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004116
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004117- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4118 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4119 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4120 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004121 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004122
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004123- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4124 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004125
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004126- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4127 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004128
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004129- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004130 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004131 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4132 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004133
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004134
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004135What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004136===============================
4137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4139
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004142
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004143- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4144 with a custom metaclass.
4145
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004146Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004149- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4150 are proxies.
4151
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004152Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004154
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004155- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4156 very short strings.
4157
4158- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4159 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4160 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4161 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4162 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4163
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004164Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004166
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004167- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4168 close or delete time).
4169
4170- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4171 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4172
4173- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4174
4175- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004176 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004177
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004178Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004180
4181Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004183
4184C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004186
4187New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004189
4190Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004192
4193Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004195
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004196- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4197
4198- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4199 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4200
4201- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4202 deleted at process exit time.
4203
4204- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4205 in backslash.
4206
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004207Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004209
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004210- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4211 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4212 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4213
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004214
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004215What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004216===========================
4217
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4219
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004222
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004223- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4224 been extensively updated. See
4225
4226 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4227
4228 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4229
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004230- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4231 deleted!
4232
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004233- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4234 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4235 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4236 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4237 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4238
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004239- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4240
4241 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4242 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4243
4244 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4245 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4246 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4247 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4248 supported anyway.
4249
4250 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4251 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4252
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004253- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4254 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4255 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4256 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4257 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004258
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004259- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4260 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4261 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4262
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004263Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004265
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004266- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4267 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4268 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4269 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4270 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4271 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004272 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4273 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4274 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4275 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004276
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004277- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4278 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4279 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4280
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004281Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004283
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004284- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4285
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004286Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004288
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004289- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4290 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4291 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4292 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4293 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4294 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4295
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004296- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4297
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004298- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4299
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004300- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4301
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004302- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4303 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4304 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4305
4306- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4307
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004308Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004311- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4312 off a search on Google.
4313
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004314Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004316
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004317- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4318 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4319 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4320 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4321 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4322 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4323 other platforms should do likewise.
4324
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004325- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4326 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4327 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4328
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004329C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004331
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004332- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4333 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4334 producing key-value pairs.
4335
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004336- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004337 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004338 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4339 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4340 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4341 previously went unchallenged.
4342
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004343New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004345
4346Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004348
4349Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004351
4352Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004354
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004355- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4356 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004357
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004358- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4359 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4360 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4361 home.
4362
4363
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004364What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004365===========================
4366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4368
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004369Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004371
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004372- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4373 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004374
4375 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004376 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004377
4378 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4379 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004380 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004381 This needs to be documented.
4382
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004383- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4384 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4385
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004386- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4387 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4388 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4389
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004390- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4391 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4392
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004393- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4394 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4395 class forbids it).
4396
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004397- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4398 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4399 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4400
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004401- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4402
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004403Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004405
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004406- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4407 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004408 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004409
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004410- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4411 (like 1 + '').
4412
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004413Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004415
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004416- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4417 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4418 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4419 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004420 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004421 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4422
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004423- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4424 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4425 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4426 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4427
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004428- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4429 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004430 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4431 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4432 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004433
4434- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4435 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004436
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004437- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4438 bytes on its input.
4439
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004440Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004442
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004443- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004444 convenience function.
4445
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004446- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4447 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4448 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004449 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4450 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4451 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4452 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4453 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4454 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004455
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004456- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4457 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4458 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4459 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4460
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004461- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4462 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4463 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4464
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004465- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4466 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4467 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4468 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4469
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004470- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4471 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004473 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4474 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4475 new -l and -e options.
4476
4477- statcache is now deprecated.
4478
4479- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4480 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004482 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4483 time properly taken into account.
4484
4485- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4486 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4487 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4488 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4489
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004490Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004492
4493Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004495
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004496- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4497 is built with libdb3 if available.
4498
4499- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4500
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004504- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4505 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4506 PySequence_Size().
4507
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004508- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4509
4510- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4511 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4512 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4513
4514- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4515 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4516
4517- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4518 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4519
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004520New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004522
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004523- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4524 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4525
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004526- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4527 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4528
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004529- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4530
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004531Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004534- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4535 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4536
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004537Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004540Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004542
4543- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4544 removed completely in the next release.
4545
4546- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4547 OSX.
4548
4549- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4550 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4551
4552- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4553
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004554
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004555What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004556===========================
4557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4559
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004560Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004562
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004563- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004564 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004565 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004566 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4567 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004568 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4569 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004570 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4571 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004572
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004573- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4574 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4575
4576- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4577 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4578
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004579Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004581
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004582- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4583 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4584 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4585 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4586 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4587 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4588 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4589 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4590
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004591- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4592 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4593 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4594 example).
4595
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004596- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004597 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004598 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004599 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004600
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004601- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4602 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4603 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004604 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004605
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004606- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4607 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4608 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4609 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4610 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4611 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4612
4613 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4614
4615 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4616
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004617Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004619
4620- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4621
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004622- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4623
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004624- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4625 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004626
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004627- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4628 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4629 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4630 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4631 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4632 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004633 attributes.
4634
4635- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4636 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4637 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004638
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004639- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4640 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4641 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004642
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004643- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4644 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4645 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004646 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4647 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4648
4649- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4650 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004651
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004652Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004654
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004655- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4656 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4657
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004658- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4659 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4660 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4661 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4662
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004663- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4664 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4665 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4666 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4667
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004668 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4669 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4670 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4671 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4672 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4673 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4674 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4675 without losing information).
4676
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004677- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004678 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4679 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4680 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4681 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4682 module).
4683
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004684 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004685 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4686 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4687 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4688 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004689
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004690- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004691 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4692 encoding.
4693
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004694- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4695 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004698 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4699
4700- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4701 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4702 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4703 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4704
4705- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4706
4707- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4708 ON, and OFF.
4709
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004710- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4711 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4712
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004713Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004715
4716- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4717 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4718 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004719
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004720- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4721 been added: -X and -E.
4722
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004723Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004725
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004726- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4727 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4728
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004729C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004731
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004732- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4733 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4734 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4735 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4736 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4737
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004738- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4739 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4740 as long) arguments.
4741
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004742- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4743 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4744 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4745 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4746 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4747 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4748
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004749- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4750 input.
4751
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004752New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004754
4755Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004757
4758Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004760
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004761- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4762 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4763 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4764
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004765- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4766 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4767 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004768 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004769
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4771 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4772 import signal
4773 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004774
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004776 while 1:
4777 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004779 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4780 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4781 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4782 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004783
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004784
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004785What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4786===========================
4787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4789
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004790Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004792
4793- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4794 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4795 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4796
4797- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4798 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4799 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4800 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4801 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4802 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4803 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004804
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004805- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004806 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004807 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4808 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4809 associate a docstring with a property.
4810
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004811- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4812 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4813 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4814 other built-in object types.
4815
4816- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4817 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4818 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4819 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4820 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4821
4822- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4823 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4824
4825- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4826 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004827 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004828 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4829 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4830 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4831 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4832 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4833
4834- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4835 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4836 class.
4837
4838- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4839 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4840 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4841 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4842
4843- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4844 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4845 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4846 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4847
4848- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4849 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4850
4851- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4852 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4853 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4854 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4855 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004856 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004857 with the same value as s.
4858
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004859- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4860
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004861Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004863
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004864- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4865
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004866- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4867 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4868 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4869 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4870 objects.
4871
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004872- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4873 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004874 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4875 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4876
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004877- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4878 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4879 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4880
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004881Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004883
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004884- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4885 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4886 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4887 by the instances.
4888
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004889- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4890 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4891 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4892
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004893- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4894 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4895 before the entire comparison is complete.
4896
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004897- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4898 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4899 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4900
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004901- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4902 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4903 getwriter().
4904
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004905- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4906 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4907
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004908- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004909 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4910 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4911
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004912- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4913 iterable object.
4914
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004915- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4916 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004917
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004918- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4919 authentication.
4920
4921- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4922 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004923
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004924- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004925 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4926 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4927 a sample driver.)
4928
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004929Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004931
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004932- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4933 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4934 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4935 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4936 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4937 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4938 kernel has large file support.
4939
4940- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4941 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4942 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4943 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4944 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4945
4946- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4947 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4948 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4949
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004951-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004952
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004953- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4954 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4955
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004956New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004958
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004959- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4960 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4961
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004962Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004964
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004965- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4966 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4967 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4968 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4969 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4970
4971- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4972 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4973 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4974 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4975
4976- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4977 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4978
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004979Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004981
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004982- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004983 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4984 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004985
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004986
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004987What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4988===========================
4989
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4991
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004994
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004995- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4996 big to represent as a C double.
4997
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004998- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4999 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5000 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5001 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5002 restriction).
5003
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005004- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5005 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5006 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5007 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5008 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5009
5010 >>> dir([])
5011 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5012 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5013 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5014 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5015 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5016 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5017 'reverse', 'sort']
5018
5019 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5020
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005021- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005022 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5023 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5024 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5025 OverflowError exception.
5026
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005027- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005028 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005029 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5030 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5031 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5032 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5033 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005034 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5036 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5037
5038 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5039 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5040 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5041 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005042
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005043- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005044 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5045 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5046 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5047 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5048 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5049 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5050 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5051 once it is created.
5052
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005053- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5054 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5055 (key, value) pairs.
5056
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005057- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005058 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5059 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5060
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005061- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5062 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5063 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5064 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5065 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005066
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005067- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005068 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5069 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5070
5071 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5072
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005073- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005074 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5075
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005076Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005078
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005079- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005080 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5081 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005082
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005083- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5084 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5085 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5086 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5087 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5088 in this area anymore).
5089
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005090- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5091 threading.Timer.
5092
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005093- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5094 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5095
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005096- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005097 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5098
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005099- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005100 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5101 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5102 converted to Python longs.
5103
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005104- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005105 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5106
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005107- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5108 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5109 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5110
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005111Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005113
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005114- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5115 division operators as per PEP 238.
5116
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005117Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005119
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005120- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5121 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5122 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5123 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5124
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005125C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005127
5128- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005129
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005130- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5131 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005132 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005133
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5135 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005136 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005138
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005139- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005140 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5141 module:
5142
5143 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005144
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005145 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5146 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005147
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005148 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5149 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005150
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005151 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5152
5153 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5154
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005155- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005156 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5157 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5158 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005159
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005160New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005162
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005163- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5164 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5165 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5166 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5167 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005168
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005169Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005171
5172Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005174
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005175- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5176 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5177 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5178 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005179 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5180 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5181 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5182 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5183 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005184
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005185- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005186 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5187
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005188
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005189What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5190===========================
5191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005192*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5193
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005194Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005195-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005196
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005197- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5198 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5199
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005200- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5201 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5202 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005203
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005204- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5205 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5206 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5207 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005208
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005209- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005212
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005213Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005215
5216- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005217 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005218 the module docstring for details.
5219
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005220Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005222
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005223- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005224 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5225 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5226 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005227
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005228- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5229 Nick Mathewson.
5230
5231Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005233
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005234- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5235 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5236 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5237 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5238 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5239 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5240 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5241 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5242
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005243- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5244 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5245 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5246 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5247
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005248- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5249 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5250 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5251 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5252 come a long way).
5253
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005254- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5255 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5256 write filters for these warnings).
5257
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005258- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5259 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5260 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5261 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5262 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5263
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005264- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5265 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5266 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5267 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5268 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5269 older distribution.
5270
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005271Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005273
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005274- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5275 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005276 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005277
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005278- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5279 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5280 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5281
5282- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5283
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005284- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5285
5286- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5287
5288- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5289
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005291
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005292- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5293
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005294New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005296
5297C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005299
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005300- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5301 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5302 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5303 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5304 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5305 against buffer overruns.
5306
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005307- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005308 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5309 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005310 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5311 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5312 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5313
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005314- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5315 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5316 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5317 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5318 deprecated.
5319
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005320Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005322
5323- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5324 relevant is found.
5325
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005326
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005327What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005328===========================
5329
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5331
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005332Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005334
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005335- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5336 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5337 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5338 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5339 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5340 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5341 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5342 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005343 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005344 repaired.
5345
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005346- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005347 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005348 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5349 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5350 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5351 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5352 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5353 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5354 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5355 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5356
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005357- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5358 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5359 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5360 leading BMO character).
5361
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005362- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5363 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5364 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5365
5366 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5367 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5368 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005369
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005370 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5371 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5372 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5373 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5374 for various simple to use conversions.
5375
5376 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5377 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5380 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5381 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5382 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5383 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5384 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5385 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5386 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5387 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5388 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5389 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5390 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5391 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5392 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5393 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005394
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005395- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5396 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5397 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005398 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005399 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005400
5401 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005402 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5403 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5404 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5405 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5406 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005407 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5408 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005409
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005410 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5411 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5412 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005413 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005414
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005415- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5416 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5417 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5418 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5419 floating arithmetic,
5420
5421 x = 9007199254740992.0
5422 print long(x)
5423
5424 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5425 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5426 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5427 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5428 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5429 functions are of good quality).
5430
5431 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5432 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5433 algorithms to break.
5434
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005435- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5436 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5437 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5438 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5439 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5440 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5441 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5442 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5443 order.
5444
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005445- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5446 operation along the most common code paths.
5447
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005448- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5449 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5450
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005451- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5452 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5453 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5454 {}.update(UserDict())
5455
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005456- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5457 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5458 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5459 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5460 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5461 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5462 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5463 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5464
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005465- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005466 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005468 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005469 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5470 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005471 join() method of strings
5472 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005473 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5474 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005475 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005476 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005477
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005478- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5479 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5480
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005481- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5482 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5483
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005484- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5485 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5486 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5487 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5488
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005489- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5490 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005491 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005492 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5493 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005494
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005495- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5496
5497
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005498Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005500
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005501- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005502 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005503 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5504 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5505
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005506- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5507 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5508
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005509- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5510 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5511 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5512 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5513
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005514- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5515 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5516 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5517
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005518- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5519
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005520- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5521
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005522- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5523 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5524 that are still imported into string.py).
5525
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005526- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5527
5528- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5529 Now it does.
5530
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005531- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5532
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005533- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5534 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5535 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5536 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5537 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005538 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5539 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005540
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005541- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5542 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5543 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5544 'help(object)'.
5545
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005546Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005547-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005548
5549- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005550 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005551 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5552 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5553
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005554- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005555 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5556 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005557
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005558C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005560
5561- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5562 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563
5564----
5565
5566**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**