blob: 758a347023b24fdb1f64cad9e9c9a0101f35fc8a [file] [log] [blame]
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
2XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX
3=================================
4
5Type/class unification and new-style classes
6
7Core and builtins
8
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00009- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
10 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
11
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +000012- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
13 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
14
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +000015- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +000016 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
17 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +000018
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +000019- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
20 now detected by the garbage collector.
21
Guido van Rossum9923ffe2002-06-04 19:52:53 +000022- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
23 [SF bug 519621]
24
25- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
26 identifier.
27
Guido van Rossum2e4e0262002-06-04 05:58:34 +000028- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
29 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
30 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
31 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
32 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
33 [SF bug 563060]
34
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +000035- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
36 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
37 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
38 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
39 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
40
Neal Norwitz32a7e7f2002-05-31 19:58:02 +000041- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
Guido van Rossumcacfc072002-05-24 19:01:59 +000042 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
43 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
Neal Norwitz32a7e7f2002-05-31 19:58:02 +000044 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
Guido van Rossumcacfc072002-05-24 19:01:59 +000045 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
46
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +000047- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
48 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
49 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
50 removed.
51
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +000052- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
53 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
54 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
55
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +000056- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
57 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
58 to __debug__.
59
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +000060- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
61 string to the left with zeros. For example,
62 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
63
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +000064- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
65 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
66 deprecated now.
67
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +000068- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
69 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
70 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +000071
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +000072- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
73 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
74
Guido van Rossum8ace1ab2002-04-06 01:05:01 +000075- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
76 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
77 not called. [SF bug #537450]
78
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +000079- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
80
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +000081- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
82 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
83 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +000084 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +000085 is backward compatible.
86
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +000087- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
88 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
89 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
90 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
91 could access a pointer to freed memory.
92
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +000093- The optional object allocator has been enabled by default.
94
Guido van Rossum8c842552002-03-14 23:05:54 +000095- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
96 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
97 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
98 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
99 state of the slots would be lost.)
100
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000101- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
102 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
103
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000104- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
105 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
106
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000107- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
108 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
109 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
110
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000111- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000112 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
113
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000114Extension modules
115
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000116- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000117 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000118 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000119
Martin v. Löwis606edc12002-06-13 21:09:11 +0000120- posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been added where
121 available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000122
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000123- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface.
124
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000125- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
126 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
127 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
128 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
129
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000130- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
131 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000132
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000133- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
134 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
135 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
136 and __imul__.
137
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000138- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000139 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
140 is called.
141
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000142- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
143 been added where available.
144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000145Library
146
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000147- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
148 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
149 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
150 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
151 [SF patch 560794].
152
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000153- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
154 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
155 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
156 mode, use s.settimeout(None).
157
158- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
159 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000160
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000161- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
162 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
163 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
164 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000165
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000166- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
167 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
168 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
169 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
170 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
171
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000172- added degree/radian conversion functions to the math module.
173
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000174- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
175 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
176 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
177 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
178 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
179 identical to None.
180
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000181- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
182 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
183 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
184 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
185 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
186 results now.
187
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000188- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
189 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
190
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000191- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
192 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
193 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
194 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
195 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
196 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
197 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
198 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
199
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000200- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
201
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000202- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
203 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
204
205- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
206 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
207 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
208 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
209 and other systems.
210
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +0000211- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE now raise a NotImplementedError
212 for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they used to just
213 produce garbage or fail with an encoding error -- UTF-16 is
214 a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
215 work well with these.
216
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000217- compileall now supports quiet operation.
218
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000219- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000220 connections.
221
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000222- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
223 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
224 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
225
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000226- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
227 sets
228
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000229- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
230 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
231 name.
232
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000233- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
234 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
235 passed in.
236
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000237- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000238 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
239 on a per-message basis.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000240
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000241- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
242
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000243- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
244
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000245- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
246 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
247 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
248
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000249- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
250 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
251 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
252 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
253 honored.
254
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000255Tools/Demos
256
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000257- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
258 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
259 the generated binary.
260
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000261Build
262
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000263- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
264 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
265 size of the executable.
266
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000267- XXX WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES Somebody fill this in; the PEP doesn't
268 say how or when to configure it, or how to turn it off.
269
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000270- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
271
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000272- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
273 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
274 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000275
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000276- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
277 well as Unix.
278
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000279- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
280 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
281 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
282 modules in the README file for details.
283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000284C API
285
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000286- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
287 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
288 adjusting for negative indices.
289
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000290- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
291 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
292 object.
293
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000294- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
295 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
296 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
297
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000298- The type of tp_free has been changed from "void (*)(PyObject *)" to
299 "void (*)(void *)".
300
301- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
302
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000303- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
304 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
305 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
306 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
307
308- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
309
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000310- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000311
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000312- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000313 without going through the buffer API.
314
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000315- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix PyCmp_.
316
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000317- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
318 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
319 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
320 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
321
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000322- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
323 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
324
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000325- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000326 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000328New platforms
329
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000330- AtheOS is now supported.
331
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000332- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
333
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000334Tests
335
336Windows
337
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000338- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
339 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
340 use files" uninstall option).
341
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000342- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
343
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000344- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
345 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
346
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000347- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
348 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
349 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
350
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000351- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
352 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
353 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
354 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
355 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000356 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
357 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
358 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000359
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000360- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000361 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000362 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
363 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
364 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
365 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
366 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
367 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
368 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
369 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
370 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
371 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
372 work around.
373
374- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
375 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
376 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
377 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
378 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
379 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
380 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
381 specified with O_CREAT too).
382
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000383Mac
384
385
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000386What's New in Python 2.2 final?
387Release date: 21-Dec-2001
388===============================
389
390Type/class unification and new-style classes
391
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000392- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
393 with a custom metaclass.
394
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000395Core and builtins
396
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000397- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
398 are proxies.
399
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000400Extension modules
401
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000402- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
403 very short strings.
404
405- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
406 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
407 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
408 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
409 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
410
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000411Library
412
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000413- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
414 close or delete time).
415
416- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
417 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
418
419- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
420
421- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000422 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000423
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000424Tools/Demos
425
426Build
427
428C API
429
430New platforms
431
432Tests
433
434Windows
435
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000436- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
437
438- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
439 instances are deleted at process exit time.
440
441- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
442 deleted at process exit time.
443
444- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
445 in backslash.
446
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000447Mac
448
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000449- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
450 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
451 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
452
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000453
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000454What's New in Python 2.2c1?
455Release date: 14-Dec-2001
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000456===========================
457
458Type/class unification and new-style classes
459
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000460- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
461 been extensively updated. See
462
463 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
464
465 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
466
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +0000467- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
468 deleted!
469
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +0000470- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
471 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
472 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
473 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
474 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
475
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000476- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
477
478 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
479 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
480
481 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
482 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
483 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
484 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
485 supported anyway.
486
487 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
488 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
489
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +0000490- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
491 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
492 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
493 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
494 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000495
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +0000496- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
497 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
498 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
499
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000500Core and builtins
501
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000502- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
503 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
504 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
505 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
506 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
507 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +0000508 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
509 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
510 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
511 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000512
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +0000513- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
514 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
515 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
516
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000517Extension modules
518
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +0000519- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
520
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000521Library
522
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +0000523- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
524 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
525 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
526 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
527 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
528 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
529
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +0000530- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
531
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +0000532- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
533
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +0000534- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
535
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000536- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
537 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
538 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
539
540- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
541
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000542Tools/Demos
543
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000544- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
545 off a search on Google.
546
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000547Build
548
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000549- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
550 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
551 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
552 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
553 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
554 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
555 other platforms should do likewise.
556
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +0000557- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
558 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
559 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
560
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000561C API
562
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +0000563- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
564 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
565 producing key-value pairs.
566
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +0000567- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +0000568 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +0000569 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
570 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
571 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
572 previously went unchallenged.
573
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000574New platforms
575
576Tests
577
578Windows
579
580Mac
581
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +0000582- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
583 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000584
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000585- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
586 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
587 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
588 home.
589
590
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000591What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000592Release date: 16-Nov-2001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000593===========================
594
595Type/class unification and new-style classes
596
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +0000597- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
598 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000599
600 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +0000601 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000602
603 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
604 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000605 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000606 This needs to be documented.
607
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +0000608- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
609 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
610
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +0000611- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
612 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
613 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
614
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +0000615- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
616 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
617
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000618- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
619 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
620 class forbids it).
621
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +0000622- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
623 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
624 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
625
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000626- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
627
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000628Core and builtins
629
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +0000630- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
631 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000632 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +0000633
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000634- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
635 (like 1 + '').
636
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000637Extension modules
638
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000639- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
640 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
641 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
642 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000643 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000644 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
645
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +0000646- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
647 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
648 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
649 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
650
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000651- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
652 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000653 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
654 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
655 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000656
657- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
658 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +0000659
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +0000660- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
661 bytes on its input.
662
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000663Library
664
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000665- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +0000666 convenience function.
667
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +0000668- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
669 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
670 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000671 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
672 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
673 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
674 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
675 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
676 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +0000677
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +0000678- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
679 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
680 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
681 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
682
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +0000683- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
684 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
685 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
686
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +0000687- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
688 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
689 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
690 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
691
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000692- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
693 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
694 optional `strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
695 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
696 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
697 new -l and -e options.
698
699- statcache is now deprecated.
700
701- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
702 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
703 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional `localtime' flag is
704 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
705 time properly taken into account.
706
707- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
708 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
709 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
710 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
711
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000712Tools/Demos
713
714Build
715
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000716- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
717 is built with libdb3 if available.
718
719- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000721C API
722
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +0000723- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
724 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
725 PySequence_Size().
726
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000727- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
728
729- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
730 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
731 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
732
733- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
734 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
735
736- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
737 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
738
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000739New platforms
740
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000741- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
742 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
743
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +0000744- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
745 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
746
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +0000747- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
748
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000749Tests
750
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +0000751- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
752 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000754Windows
755
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000756Mac
757
758- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
759 removed completely in the next release.
760
761- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
762 OSX.
763
764- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
765 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
766
767- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
768
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000769
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000770What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000771Release date: 19-Oct-2001
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000772===========================
773
774Type/class unification and new-style classes
775
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +0000776- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +0000777 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +0000778 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +0000779 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
780 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +0000781 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
782 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +0000783 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
784 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +0000785
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +0000786- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
787 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
788
789- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
790 class methods, static methods, and properties.
791
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000792Core and builtins
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000793
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +0000794- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
795 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
796 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
797 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
798 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
799 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
800 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
801 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
802
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000803- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
804 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
805 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
806 example).
807
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +0000808- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +0000809 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +0000810 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000811 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +0000812
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000813- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
814 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
815 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +0000816 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000817
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000818- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
819 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
820 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
821 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
822 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
823 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
824
825 isinstance(x, (A, B))
826
827 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
828
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000829Extension modules
830
831- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
832
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +0000833- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
834
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +0000835- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
836 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +0000837
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +0000838- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
839 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
840 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
841 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
842 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
843 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +0000844 attributes.
845
846- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
847 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
848 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +0000849
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000850- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
851 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
852 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000853
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +0000854- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
855 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
856 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000857 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
858 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
859
860- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
861 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +0000862
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000863Library
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +0000864
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +0000865- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
866 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
867
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +0000868- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
869 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
870 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
871 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
872
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +0000873- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
874 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
875 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
876 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
877
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +0000878 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
879 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
880 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
881 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
882 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
883 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
884 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
885 without losing information).
886
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +0000887- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +0000888 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
889 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
890 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
891 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
892 module).
893
894 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
895 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
896 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
897 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
898 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +0000899
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +0000900- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +0000901 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
902 encoding.
903
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +0000904- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
905 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
906
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000907- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a `file' argument
908 to allow saving the message body to a file.
909
910- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
911 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
912 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
913 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
914
915- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
916
917- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
918 ON, and OFF.
919
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +0000920- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
921 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
922
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +0000923Tools/Demos
924
925- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
926 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
927 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000928
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000929- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
930 been added: -X and -E.
931
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000932Build
933
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000934- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
935 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
936
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000937C API
938
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +0000939- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
940 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
941 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
942 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
943 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
944
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +0000945- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
946 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
947 as long) arguments.
948
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +0000949- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
950 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
951 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
952 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
953 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
954 report any bugs or strange behavior).
955
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000956- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
957 input.
958
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000959New platforms
960
961Tests
962
963Windows
964
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +0000965- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
966 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
967 is created for .py and .pyw files.
968
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +0000969- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
970 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
971 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
972 signal.signal(). For example:
973
974 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
975 # (SIGINT) behavior.
976 import signal
977 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK,
978 signal.default_int_handler)
979
980 try:
981 while 1:
982 pass
983 except KeyboardInterrupt:
984 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
985 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
986 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
987 print "Clean exit"
988
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000989
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000990What's New in Python 2.2a4?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +0000991Release date: 28-Sep-2001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000992===========================
993
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +0000994Type/class unification and new-style classes
995
996- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
997 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
998 documentation for all operations on list objects.
999
1000- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1001 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1002 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1003 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1004 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1005 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1006 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001007
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001008- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001009 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001010 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1011 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1012 associate a docstring with a property.
1013
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001014- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1015 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1016 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1017 other built-in object types.
1018
1019- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1020 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1021 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1022 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1023 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1024
1025- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1026 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1027
1028- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1029 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001030 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001031 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1032 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1033 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1034 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1035 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1036
1037- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1038 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1039 class.
1040
1041- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1042 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1043 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1044 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1045
1046- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1047 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1048 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1049 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1050
1051- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1052 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1053
1054- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1055 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1056 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1057 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1058 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001059 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001060 with the same value as s.
1061
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001062- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1063
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001064Core
1065
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001066- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1067
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001068- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1069 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1070 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1071 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1072 objects.
1073
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001074- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1075 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001076 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1077 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1078
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001079- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1080 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1081 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1082
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001083Library
1084
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001085- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1086 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1087 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1088 by the instances.
1089
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001090- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1091 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1092 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1093
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001094- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1095 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1096 before the entire comparison is complete.
1097
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001098- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1099 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1100 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1101
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001102- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1103 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1104 getwriter().
1105
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001106- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1107 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1108
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001109- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001110 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1111 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1112
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001113- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1114 iterable object.
1115
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001116- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1117 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001118
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001119- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1120 authentication.
1121
1122- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1123 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001124
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001125- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001126 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1127 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1128 a sample driver.)
1129
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001130Tools
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001131
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001132Build
1133
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001134- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1135 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1136 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1137 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1138 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1139 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1140 kernel has large file support.
1141
1142- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1143 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1144 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1145 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1146 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1147
1148- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1149 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1150 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1151
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001152C API
1153
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001154- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1155 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1156
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001157New platforms
1158
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001159- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1160 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1161
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001162Tests
1163
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001164- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1165 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1166 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1167 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1168 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1169
1170- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1171 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1172 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1173 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1174
1175- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1176 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1177
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001178Windows
1179
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001180- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001181 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1182 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001183
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001184
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001185What's New in Python 2.2a3?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001186Release Date: 07-Sep-2001
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001187===========================
1188
1189Core
1190
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001191- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1192 big to represent as a C double.
1193
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001194- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1195 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1196 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1197 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1198 restriction).
1199
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001200- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1201 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1202 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1203 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1204 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1205
1206 >>> dir([])
1207 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1208 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1209 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1210 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1211 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1212 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1213 'reverse', 'sort']
1214
1215 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1216
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001217- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001218 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1219 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1220 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1221 OverflowError exception.
1222
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001223- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001224 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001225 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1226 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1227 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1228 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1229 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001230 (for use with fixdiv.py).
1231 [Note: the remainder of this paragraph (preserved below) became
1232 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2]
1233 <obsolete>
1234 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1235 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1236 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1237 warns about classic division everywhere else.
1238 </obsolete>
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001239
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001240- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001241 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1242 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1243 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1244 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1245 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1246 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1247 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1248 once it is created.
1249
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001250- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1251 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1252 (key, value) pairs.
1253
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001254- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001255 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1256 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1257
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001258- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1259 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1260 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1261 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1262 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001263
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001264- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001265 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1266 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1267
1268 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1269
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001270- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001271 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1272
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001273Library
1274
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001275- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
1276 setting an option negotiation callback.
1277
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001278- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1279 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1280 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1281 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1282 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1283 in this area anymore).
1284
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001285- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1286 threading.Timer.
1287
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001288- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1289 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1290
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001291- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001292 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1293
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001294- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001295 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1296 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1297 converted to Python longs.
1298
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001299- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001300 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1301
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001302- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1303 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1304 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1305
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001306Tools
1307
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001308- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1309 division operators as per PEP 238.
1310
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001311Build
1312
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001313- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1314 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1315 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1316 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1317
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001318C API
1319
1320- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001321
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001322- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1323 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
1324 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check:
1325
1326 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1327 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1328 /* The conversion failed. */
1329 }
1330
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001331- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001332 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1333 module:
1334
1335 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001336
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001337 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1338 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001339
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001340 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1341 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001342
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001343 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1344
1345 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1346
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001347- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001348 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1349 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1350 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001351
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001352New platforms
1353
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001354- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1355 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1356 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1357 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1358 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001359
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001360Tests
1361
1362Windows
1363
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001364- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1365 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1366 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1367 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001368 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1369 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1370 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1371 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1372 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001373
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001374- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001375 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1376
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001377
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001378What's New in Python 2.2a2?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001379Release Date: 22-Aug-2001
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001380===========================
1381
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001382Build
1383
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001384- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1385 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1386
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001387- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1388 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1389 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001390
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001391- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1392 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1393 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1394 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001395
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001396- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1397
1398- The `new' module is now statically linked.
1399
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001400Tools
1401
1402- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001403 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001404 the module docstring for details.
1405
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001406Tests
1407
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001408- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001409 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
1410 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
1411 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001412
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001413- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
1414 Nick Mathewson.
1415
1416Core
1417
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001418- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
1419 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
1420 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
1421 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
1422 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
1423 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
1424 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
1425 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
1426
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00001427- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
1428 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
1429 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
1430 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
1431
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00001432- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
1433 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
1434 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
1435 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
1436 come a long way).
1437
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001438- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
1439 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
1440 write filters for these warnings).
1441
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00001442- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
1443 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
1444 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
1445 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
1446 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
1447
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00001448- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
1449 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
1450 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
1451 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
1452 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
1453 older distribution.
1454
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001455Library
1456
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001457- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
1458 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001459 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001460
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001461- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
1462 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
1463 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
1464
1465- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
1466
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001467- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
1468
1469- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
1470
1471- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
1472
1473- The `new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
1474
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001475- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
1476
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001477New platforms
1478
1479C API
1480
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001481- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
1482 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
1483 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
1484 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
1485 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
1486 against buffer overruns.
1487
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001488- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001489 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
1490 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001491 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
1492 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
1493 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
1494
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001495- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
1496 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
1497 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
1498 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
1499 deprecated.
1500
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001501Windows
1502
1503- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
1504 relevant is found.
1505
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001506
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001507What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Barry Warsawd970fe42001-10-25 21:53:30 +00001508Release date: 18-Jul-2001
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001509===========================
1510
1511Core
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001512
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00001513- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
1514 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
1515 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
1516 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
1517 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
1518 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
1519 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
1520 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
1521 incompapatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
1522 repaired.
1523
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001524- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00001525 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001526 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
1527 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
1528 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
1529 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
1530 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
1531 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
1532 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
1533 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
1534
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00001535- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
1536 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
1537 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
1538 leading BMO character).
1539
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001540- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
1541 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
1542 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
1543
1544 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
1545 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
1546 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001547
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001548 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
1549 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
1550 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
1551 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
1552 for various simple to use conversions.
1553
1554 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
1555 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
1556
1557 Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description
1558 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
1559 uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email)
1560 base64 | string | string | base64 codec
Guido van Rossumc3415802001-06-06 13:30:54 +00001561 quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001562 zlib | string | string | zlib compression
1563 hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec
1564 rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec
1565
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001566- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
1567 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
1568 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001569 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001570 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001571
1572 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001573 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
1574 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
1575 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
1576 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
1577 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001578 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
1579 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001580
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001581 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
1582 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
1583 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001584 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001585
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00001586- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
1587 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
1588 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
1589 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
1590 floating arithmetic,
1591
1592 x = 9007199254740992.0
1593 print long(x)
1594
1595 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
1596 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
1597 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
1598 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
1599 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
1600 functions are of good quality).
1601
1602 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
1603 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
1604 algorithms to break.
1605
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00001606- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
1607 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
1608 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
1609 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
1610 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
1611 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
1612 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
1613 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
1614 order.
1615
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001616- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
1617 operation along the most common code paths.
1618
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00001619- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
1620 the same as dict.has_key(x).
1621
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00001622- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
1623 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
1624 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
1625 {}.update(UserDict())
1626
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00001627- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
1628 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
1629 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
1630 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
1631 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
1632 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
1633 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
1634 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
1635
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001636- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
1637 arguments:
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00001638 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00001639 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
1640 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00001641 join() method of strings
1642 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00001643 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
1644 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00001645 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as
1646 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00001647
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00001648- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
1649 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
1650
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00001651- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
1652 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
1653
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00001654- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
1655 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
1656 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
1657 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
1658
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001659- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
1660 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001661 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001662 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
1663 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00001664
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00001665- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
1666
1667
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001668Library
1669
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00001670- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
1671 were added to the string module. These a locale-indenpendent
1672 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
1673 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
1674
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00001675- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
1676 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
1677
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00001678- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
1679 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
1680 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
1681 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
1682
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00001683- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
1684 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
1685 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
1686
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00001687- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
1688
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00001689- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
1690
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00001691- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
1692 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
1693 that are still imported into string.py).
1694
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001695- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
1696
1697- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
1698 Now it does.
1699
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00001700- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
1701
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00001702- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
1703 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
1704 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
1705 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
1706 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001707 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
1708 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00001709
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00001710- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
1711 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
1712 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
1713 'help(object)'.
1714
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001715Tests
1716
1717- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
1718 comparison operators mutute the dicts randomly during comparison. This
1719 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
1720 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
1721
1722- New test_pprint.py verfies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00001723 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
1724 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001725
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00001726C API
1727
1728- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
1729 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
1730
1731
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001732======================================================================
1733
1734
Guido van Rossumffe13be2001-04-16 18:46:45 +00001735What's New in Python 2.1 (final)?
1736=================================
1737
1738We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in
1739Python library code:
1740
1741- A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which
1742 define no grouping for numeric formatting.
1743
1744- A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak
1745 dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed,
1746 and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs.
1747
1748- An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python
1749 2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception
1750 instead of being ignored.
1751
1752- Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's
1753 PyChecker.
1754
1755
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001756What's New in Python 2.1c2?
1757===========================
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00001758
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001759A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of
1760time made it necessary to release another release candidate. The list
1761here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates):
Guido van Rossum4fb60362001-04-13 00:46:14 +00001762
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001763Core
Guido van Rossum4fb60362001-04-13 00:46:14 +00001764
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001765- Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by
1766 PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of
1767 PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items(). This was
1768 fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a
1769 saner and more robust implementation.
1770
1771- Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global.
1772
1773Build and Ports
1774
1775- The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib
1776 (1.1.3 is needed). Now it does.
1777
1778- Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries.
1779
1780- Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README.
1781
1782Library
1783
1784- Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which
1785 omitted the slash between host and file.html.
1786
1787- The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken
1788 and undocumented seek() method. Ripped it out.
1789
1790- Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd,
1791 sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker.
1792
1793- Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest.
1794
1795Extensions
1796
1797- Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support
1798 RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to
1799 fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on
1800 some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and
1801 that's unacceptable.
1802
1803Tests
1804
1805- Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle".
1806
1807- Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows.
1808
1809- In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w",
1810 not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all).
1811
1812- Fix pstats browser crashes. Import readline if it exists to make
1813 the user interface nicer.
1814
1815- Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the
1816 threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile). This
1817 prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting
1818 from a previously caught failed import.
1819
1820- Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was
1821 needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run
1822 twice in succession.
1823
1824- Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found.
1825
1826
1827What's New in Python 2.1c1?
1828===========================
1829
1830This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1
1831release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1:
1832
1833Legal
1834
1835- Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a
1836 PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added.
1837
1838- The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001.
1839
1840Core
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00001841
Guido van Rossumc9932722001-04-12 02:31:27 +00001842- After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal;
1843 instead, a warning is issued. It will become illegal in 2.2.
1844
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001845- Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that
1846 "%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero.
1847
1848- Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler.
1849
1850- Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions.
1851
1852- Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs.
1853
1854Build and Ports
1855
1856- Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files.
1857
Guido van Rossum34d37dc2001-04-11 21:03:32 +00001858- New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie.
1859
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001860- Updated RISCOS port.
1861
1862- Updated BeOS port and notes.
1863
1864- Various other porting problems resolved.
1865
1866Library
1867
1868- The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and
1869 unnecessary. Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and
1870 socket modules.
1871
1872- Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added
1873 better tests for pickling.
1874
1875- threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt.
1876
1877- zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive
1878 represented by an open file rather than a file name. Fix bug where
1879 the archive was not properly closed. Fixed a bug in this bugfix
1880 where flush() was called for a read-only file.
1881
1882- imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager.
1883
1884- Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods.
1885
1886- SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method)
1887 so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request.
1888
1889- pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser,
1890 invoked when the module is run as a script.
1891
1892- locale: fixed a problem in format().
1893
1894- webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a
1895 value like "/usr/bin/netscape". Made it auto-detect Konqueror for
1896 KDE 2. Fixed some other nits.
1897
1898- unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than
1899 AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases. Some other
1900 small changes.
1901
1902- urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits.
1903
1904- asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the
1905 2.1b2 release. Fixed another rare bug.
1906
1907- Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example).
1908
1909XML
1910
1911- pyexpat: new API get_version_string().
1912
1913- Fixed some minidom bugs.
1914
1915Extensions
1916
1917- Fixed a core dump in _weakref. Removed the weakref.mapping()
1918 function (it adds nothing to the API).
1919
1920- Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make
1921 it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline
1922 4.2, without breaking for earlier versions.
1923
1924- Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev.
1925
1926- Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module
1927 work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL.
1928
1929Tests
1930
1931- Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore.
1932
1933- Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break
1934 another.
1935
1936Tools
1937
1938- Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits
1939 in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his
1940 inspect module.
1941
1942- An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken
1943 Manheimer's pdbtrack.el. This makes debugging Python code via pdb
1944 much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs. When stepping through your program
1945 with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the
1946 source file and line will be tracked by an arrow. Very cool!
1947
1948- IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors.
1949
1950- Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types,
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00001951 follow some more links).
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001952
1953- Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date.
Guido van Rossum34d37dc2001-04-11 21:03:32 +00001954
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00001955
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001956What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2?
1957================================
1958
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00001959(Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.)
1960
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001961Core language, builtins, and interpreter
1962
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00001963- The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import
1964 nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends
1965 into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the
1966 interactive interpreter.
1967
1968- When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)),
1969 this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class
1970 instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook).
1971
1972- Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents
1973 dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless.
1974
1975- Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms.
1976 This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful
1977 results in extreme cases. Complex repr() now uses full precision
1978 like float repr().
1979
1980- sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations.
1981
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00001982- It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the
1983 interpreter starts. It is effectively a compile-time constant.
1984
1985- A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable
1986 follows a use or assignment of that variable.
1987
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001988Standard library
1989
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00001990- unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT,
1991 inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library. You now
1992 have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to
1993 write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from
1994 docstrings. Both approaches have their advantages and
1995 disadvantages.
1996
1997- A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library
1998 for Tk. With that module, it is not necessary to statically link
1999 Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package
2000 require" command. See Demo/tix/.
2001
2002- tzparse.py is now obsolete.
2003
2004- In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were
2005 non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their
2006 existence with hasattr().
2007
2008Python/C API
2009
2010- PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key
2011 that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration.
2012 This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation
2013 could be triggered that would rehash all the keys. All other
2014 modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a
2015 PyDict_Next() iteration!
2016
2017- New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around.
2018
2019- New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass()
2020 implement isinstance() and issubclass().
2021
2022- Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex
2023 number from a Py_complex C value.
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00002024
Fred Drake4e262a92001-03-22 18:26:47 +00002025- Extensions types which support weak references must now set the
2026 field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves;
2027 this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a
2028 weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are
2029 not weakly referencable.
2030
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00002031- PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for
2032 free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals.
2033
2034- Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added
2035 to support the nested_scopes future statement. The variants all end
2036 in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples:
2037 PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags(). These
2038 variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002039 mandatory.
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00002040
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002041Distutils
2042
2043- the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241,
2044 into the release tree.
2045
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002046- several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002047 (an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display)
2048
2049- from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for
2050 users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002051 MacPython is awkward). Jack also made various fixes for the Mac
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002052 and the Metrowerks compiler.
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002053
2054- added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be
2055 specified for a distribution.
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002056
2057- applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with
2058 Cygwin.
2059
2060
Tim Peters2fe289a2001-03-01 22:19:38 +00002061What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1?
2062================================
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002063
2064Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2065
Guido van Rossum9d0fbde2001-03-02 14:00:32 +00002066- Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code
2067 broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided
2068 to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at
2069 least 6 months) to make it standard. The option can be enabled on a
2070 per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at
2071 the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after
2072 comments and an optional docstring). See PEP 236 (Back to the
2073 __future__) for a description of the __future__ statement. PEP 227
2074 (Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change,
2075 and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases.
2076
2077- The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most
2078 bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed.
2079
2080- Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions
2081 that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled:
2082
2083 - Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function
2084 scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or
2085 more free (non-local) variables. The presence of the import* or
2086 bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the
2087 exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it
2088 impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the
2089 inner scope. To avoid the warning about import *, change it into
2090 an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement
2091 to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use
2092 exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that
2093 bare exec will be deprecated in the future).
2094
2095 - Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a
2096 local variable in a surrounding scope. This will change in
2097 meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will
2098 reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global
2099 of the same name. To avoid the warning, either rename the outer
2100 variable, or use a global statement in the inner function.
2101
Neil Schemenauera35c6882001-02-27 04:45:05 +00002102- An optional object allocator has been included. This allocator is
2103 optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory
2104 than the standard system allocator. It is not enabled by default
2105 because of possible thread safety problems. The allocator is only
2106 protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some
2107 extension modules require a thread safe allocator. The object
2108 allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to
2109 configure.
2110
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002111Standard library
2112
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002113- pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A
2114 number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available
2115 since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and
2116 GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x
2117 only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and
2118 specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added,
2119 which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used.
2120
2121- xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and
2122 getDOMImplementation.
2123
2124- xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM
2125 conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now
2126 has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was
2127 improved.
2128
Andrew M. Kuchlingd6a1d792001-02-28 21:05:42 +00002129- Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for
2130 getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module
2131 for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text.
2132 Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002133 <prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running
Guido van Rossume3955a82001-03-02 14:05:59 +00002134 "pydoc -h" for instructions. "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that
2135 lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser.
Andrew M. Kuchlingd6a1d792001-02-28 21:05:42 +00002136
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002137- New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher
2138 class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool.
2139
2140- doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings)
2141 is now part of the std library.
2142
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002143Windows changes
2144
Guido van Rossume3955a82001-03-02 14:05:59 +00002145- A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a
2146 small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your
2147 default web browser.
2148
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002149- Import is now case-sensitive. PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive
2150 Platforms) is implemented. See
2151
2152 http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html
2153
2154 for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section.
2155 The new Windows import rules are simpler than before:
2156
2157 A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as
2158 before: silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any
2159 kind; raise ImportError if none found.
2160
2161 B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise
2162 ImportError if none found.
2163
2164 The same rules have been implented on other platforms with case-
2165 insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and
2166 several flavors of Macintosh operating systems).
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002167
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00002168- winsound module: Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate
2169 what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct
2170 port manipulation. It's unknown whether this will work on all systems,
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002171 but it does work on my Win98SE systems now and was known to be useless on
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00002172 all Win9x systems before.
2173
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002174- Build: Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi.
2175
Tim Peters2fe289a2001-03-01 22:19:38 +00002176New platforms
2177
2178- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+.
2179 Thanks to Steven Majewski!
2180
2181- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin. Thanks to Jason
2182 Tishler!
2183
Guido van Rossum9089b272001-03-02 06:49:50 +00002184- 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar
2185 Schwertberger! See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems
2186 that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002187 to that platform is easy.
Guido van Rossum9089b272001-03-02 06:49:50 +00002188
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00002189
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002190What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2?
2191=================================
Tim Peters40ead762001-01-27 05:35:26 +00002192
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002193Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2194
Jeremy Hylton4589bd82001-02-01 20:38:45 +00002195- Scopes nest. If a name is used in a function or class, but is not
2196 local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will
2197 be used. One consequence of this change is that lambda statements
2198 could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is
2199 defined. In some unusual cases, this change will break code.
2200
2201 In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly
2202 three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00002203 the builtin namespace. According to this old definition, if a
Jeremy Hylton4589bd82001-02-01 20:38:45 +00002204 function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are
2205 not visible in A. The new rules make names bound in B visible in A,
2206 unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B.
2207
2208 Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules
2209 in detail. The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates
2210 some of the effects of the change.
2211
2212 The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested
2213 functions where an outer function has local variables with the same
2214 name as globals or builtins used by the inner function. Example:
2215
2216 def munge(str):
2217 def helper(x):
2218 return str(x)
2219 if type(str) != type(''):
2220 str = helper(str)
2221 return str.strip()
2222
2223 Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the
2224 builtin function str(). Under the new rules, it will be bound to
2225 the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is
2226 called.
2227
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00002228- The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs
2229 in a function or class scope. The language reference has documented
2230 that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it.
2231 The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this
2232 form of name binding ambiguous. In a future release, the compiler
2233 may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity.
2234
Tim Peters40ead762001-01-27 05:35:26 +00002235- repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal,
2236 and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively):
2237
2238 >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255)
2239 '\texample \r\n\x00\xff' # in 2.1
2240 '\011example \015\012\000\377' # in 2.0
2241
Moshe Zadka6af0ce02001-01-29 06:41:00 +00002242- Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since
2243 the func_code attribute is writable.
2244
Fred Drakefb9d7122001-02-01 20:00:40 +00002245- Weak references (PEP 205) have been added. This involves a few
2246 changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python
2247 module (weakref). The weakref module is the public interface. It
2248 includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and
2249 mappings with weakly held values.
2250
Jeremy Hylton0072d5a2001-02-01 22:53:15 +00002251- A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body
2252 of a loop. It is still not possible to use continue in a finally
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002253 clause.
Jeremy Hylton0072d5a2001-02-01 22:53:15 +00002254
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002255Standard library
2256
Barry Warsaw30dbd142001-01-31 22:14:01 +00002257- mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is
2258 identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for
2259 determining From_ separators. Also, the constructors for all the
2260 classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which
2261 is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by
2262 the next() method.
2263
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002264- random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of
2265 the now-deprecated whrandom.py. See the docs for details. random.py
2266 also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002267 and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n),
2268 for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to
2269 random() had been made. The latter is particularly useful for multi-
2270 threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for
2271 each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a
2272 non-overlapping segment of the full period.
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002273
Tim Peters0de88fc2001-02-01 04:59:18 +00002274- random.py's seed() function is new. For bit-for-bit compatibility with
2275 prior releases, use the whseed function instead. The new seed function
2276 addresses two problems: (1) The old function couldn't produce more than
2277 about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best
2278 that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator). (2) The old function
2279 sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct
2280 integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen;
2281 the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all
2282 arguments in [0, 27814431486576L).
2283
Jeremy Hylton4c4fda02001-02-02 03:29:24 +00002284- The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux. The socket
2285 family is AF_PACKET.
2286
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002287- test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API. The tests
2288 are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c.
2289
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00002290- A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the
2291 internal symbol table used by the Python compiler. A higher-level
2292 interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release.
2293
Andrew M. Kuchlingdebc3522001-02-22 15:53:21 +00002294- Removed the obsolete soundex module.
2295
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002296- xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports
2297 the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method.
2298
2299- xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it
2300 generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events.
2301
Tim Petersee826f82001-01-31 19:39:44 +00002302Windows changes
2303
2304- Build procedure: the zlib project is built in a different way that
2305 ensures the zlib header files used can no longer get out of synch with
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002306 the zlib binary used. See PCbuild\readme.txt for details. Your old
2307 zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh
2308 source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory.
Tim Petersee826f82001-01-31 19:39:44 +00002309
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002310- Build: New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above).
2311
Tim Petersb16c56f2001-02-02 21:24:51 +00002312- Build: New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent
2313 interface to some Python compiler internals).
2314
2315- Build: Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002316 unicodedata subproject.
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002317
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002318What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1?
2319=================================
2320
2321Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2322
Marc-André Lemburgebb195b2001-01-20 10:34:52 +00002323- There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API
2324 called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the
2325 former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object
2326 (applying the usual coercion if necessary).
Marc-André Lemburgad7c98e2001-01-17 17:09:53 +00002327
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002328- The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP
2329 207). C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in
2330 the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object. The cmp() function
2331 and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich
2332 comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison. There
2333 is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on
2334 the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the
2335 rich comparison to a Boolean result).
2336
2337 The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of
2338 which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and
2339 an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ,
2340 Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python
2341 object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare
2342 slot function is used as a fallback, if defined).
2343
2344 Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one
2345 or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__,
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002346 __ge__. There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of
2347 these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection,
2348 likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own
2349 reflection (similar at the C level). No other implications are
2350 made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean
2351 inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=. This makes
2352 it possible to define types with partial orderings.
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002353
2354 Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not
2355 the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement ==
2356 and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators.
2357
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002358 It is possible to define types whose rich comparison results are not
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002359 Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits
2360 for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons. Such types should ensure
2361 that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises
2362 an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot
2363 at the C level) to always raise an exception.
2364
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002365- Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise
2366 an exception for <, <=, > and >=. Unfortunately, this also means
2367 that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two
2368 numbers differ. Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare
2369 complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break
2370 too much code.
2371
Tim Peters3389f192001-02-18 08:48:49 +00002372- The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is
Tim Peters14495852001-02-18 08:28:33 +00002373 not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but
2374 consistent (see the Reference Manual). An implementation detail changed
2375 in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object. Code
2376 relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous
2377 behavior) does so at its own risk.
2378
Barry Warsaw573b5412001-01-15 20:43:18 +00002379- Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily
2380 named attributes (PEP 232). Functions have a new __dict__
2381 (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes. Methods get
2382 and set attributes on their underlying im_func. It is a TypeError
2383 to set an attribute on a bound method.
2384
Guido van Rossum051e3352001-01-15 19:11:10 +00002385- The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that
2386 xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms. There's still a
2387 limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be
2388 calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will
2389 work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31.
2390 (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing
2391 that is much more work.)
2392
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00002393- Two changes to from...import:
2394
Guido van Rossumba381232001-02-03 15:06:40 +00002395 1) "from M import X" now works even if (after loading module M)
2396 sys.modules['M'] is not a real module; it's basically a getattr()
2397 operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError.
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00002398
2399 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to
2400 import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but
2401 filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not
2402 __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M.
2403
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002404- File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest
2405 way to iterate over all lines in a file:
2406
2407 for line in file.xreadlines():
2408 ...do something to line...
2409
2410 See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for
2411 other file-like objects.
2412
2413- Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on
2414 line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002415 quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that
2416 support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are
2417 used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(),
2418 a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by
2419 default.
2420
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002421 You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing
2422 USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002423 getc_unlocked()).
2424
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002425 You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing
2426 DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002427 test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!).
2428
2429- In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other
2430 methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using
2431 file.readlines(sizehint).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002432
2433- Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new
2434 command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings.
2435 See the description of the warnings module below.
2436
2437- Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly
2438 affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type
2439 numerical operators without having to use coercion), but
2440 occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed
2441 subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this
Guido van Rossumae72d872001-01-11 15:00:14 +00002442 is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002443 supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002444 reflected arguments.
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002445
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002446- In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton
2447 object, NotImplemented is defined. This can be returned for
2448 operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a
2449 particular combination of arguments. From C, this is
2450 Py_NotImplemented.
2451
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +00002452- The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even
2453 if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing
2454
Martin v. Löwise214baa2001-02-04 22:37:56 +00002455import imp,sys,string
2456magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"")
2457reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable)
2458open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg)
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +00002459
2460 any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument
2461 to execve(2)).
2462
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002463- %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002464 character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign,
2465 and raised an error if the value of the long was too large
2466 to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and
2467 only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent
2468 across platforms (because the size of an int varies across
2469 platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example:
2470
2471 >>> "%x" % -0x42L
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002472 '-42' # in 2.1
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002473 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines
2474 >>> hex(-0x42L)
2475 '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python
2476
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002477 The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains
2478 the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised
2479 an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int).
2480
2481 %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed
2482 and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long
2483 formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to
2484 fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted
2485 via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int.
2486
Guido van Rossum3661d392000-12-12 22:10:31 +00002487- Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes
2488 an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of
2489 a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a
2490 dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one
2491 item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time;
2492 using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time.
2493
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002494Standard library
2495
Thomas Woutersfe385252001-01-19 23:16:56 +00002496- In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime,
2497 localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to
2498 the current time (in the local timezone).
2499
Guido van Rossumda91f222001-01-15 16:36:08 +00002500- The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a
2501 more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls
2502 these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect
2503 to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is
2504 expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call
2505 ftp.set_pasv(0).
2506
Martin v. Löwis10a27872001-01-13 09:54:41 +00002507- The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration,
2508 but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting
2509 with import are executed.
2510
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002511- There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for
2512 issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in
2513 exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line
2514 option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We
2515 turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category])
2516 issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as
2517 PyErr_Warn(category, message).
2518
2519- A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory
2520 function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the
2521 absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open
2522 file(-like) object:
2523
2524 import xreadlines
2525 for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file):
2526 ...do something to line...
2527
2528 This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using
2529 file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object
2530 (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent:
2531
2532 for line in file.xreadlines():
2533 ...do something to line...
2534
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002535- The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left,
2536 bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort
2537 are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right
2538 and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element
2539 compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the
2540 XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the
Tim Peters742bb6f2001-01-05 08:05:32 +00002541 right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should
2542 continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort").
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002543
Andrew M. Kuchlingf6f3a892001-01-13 14:53:34 +00002544- The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part
2545 of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum.
2546
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002547- The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by
2548 default in the TCPServer class.
2549
2550- A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of
2551 the caller. This is intended only as a building block for
2552 higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation.
2553
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002554- The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are
2555 available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it
2556 will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects
2557 participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown
2558 encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only
2559 for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as
2560 XMLParserObject.
2561
2562- xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and
2563 exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom
2564 was adjusted to use them.
2565
2566- The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was
2567 improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the
2568 previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified;
2569 Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and
2570 DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the
2571 hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText
2572 method.
2573
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002574Build issues
2575
Guido van Rossum1e33bdc2001-01-23 03:17:00 +00002576- For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of
2577 extension modules is now greatly automated. Rather than having to
2578 edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be
2579 built and where their include files and libraries are, a
2580 distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most
2581 extension modules. All extension modules built this way are built
2582 as shared libraries. Only a few modules that must be linked
2583 statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to
2584 edit their configuration.
2585
2586- Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin. If it doesn't,
2587 mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002588
2589- Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt()
2590 -- there's too much variation among C library getopt()
2591 implementations.
2592
2593- C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a
2594 C++ compiler if one is found.
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002595
Tim Petersd92dfe02000-12-12 01:18:41 +00002596Windows changes
2597
2598- select module: By default under Windows, a select() call
2599 can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts
2600 this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than
2601 that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE
2602 and recompile Python from source).
2603
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002604- Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3
2605 subdirectory is no more!
2606
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002607
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002608What's New in Python 2.0?
Fred Drake1a640502000-10-16 20:27:25 +00002609=========================
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002610
Guido van Rossum8ed602b2000-09-01 22:34:33 +00002611Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002612changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly
2613from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the
2614HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there.
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002615
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002616Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is
2617the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
2618http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/.
Guido van Rossum1f83cce1997-10-06 21:04:35 +00002619
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002620--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)
Guido van Rossum437cfe81999-04-08 20:17:57 +00002621
2622======================================================================
2623
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002624What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)?
2625==============================================
2626
2627Standard library
2628
2629- The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to
2630 register pickle support for extension types, not for classes.
2631 pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class.
2632
2633- Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented
2634 it from finding an existing .mo file.
2635
2636- Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib.
2637
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002638- The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of
2639 underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python
2640 used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform-
2641 dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE
2642 on underflow).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002643
2644- Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not
2645 at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to
2646 extend past the end of the file.
2647
2648- Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on
2649 Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of
2650 interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp).
2651
2652- Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP
2653 redirect response.
2654
2655- Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was
2656 removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip
2657 program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this
2658 installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave
2659 more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The
2660 test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to
2661 use both normcase() and normpath().
2662
Jeremy Hyltond867a2c2000-10-16 20:41:38 +00002663- Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom,
2664 pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002665
2666- The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with
2667 -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as
2668 garbage but not freed by the garbage collector.
2669
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002670- The regression test for the math module was changed to test
2671 exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python
2672 cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms,
2673 so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and
2674 may fail on your platform.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002675
2676Internals
2677
2678- PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused
2679 test_sre to fail.
2680
2681Build issues
2682
2683- Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and
2684 -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see
2685 exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002686 --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in
Tim Petersadfb94f2000-10-16 20:51:33 +00002687 Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002688
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002689- Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002690
2691Tools and other miscellany
2692
2693- The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new
2694 language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list
2695 comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should
2696 also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will
2697 always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002698 under.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002699
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002700What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)?
2701=====================================================
2702
Jeremy Hylton6040aaa2000-10-09 21:27:22 +00002703What is release candidate 1?
2704
2705We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we
2706intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit
2707more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more
2708widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this
2709release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless
2710any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the
2711release candidate.
2712
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002713All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002714to support building Python for specific platforms.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002715
2716Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2717
2718- A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented
2719 assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed.
2720
2721- Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number,
2722 e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin
2723 power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by
2724 platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError.
2725
2726- A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally
2727 caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the
2728 following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError.
2729
2730- Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead
2731 of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50).
2732
2733- In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode,
2734 rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again.
2735
2736Standard library
2737
2738- Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object
2739 methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine.
2740
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002741- In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that
Jeremy Hylton32e20ff2000-10-09 19:48:11 +00002742 manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002743
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002744- Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter
2745 were fixed.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002746
2747- Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines.
2748
2749- Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with
2750 the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are
2751 performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate
2752 method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002753 argument.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002754
2755- There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its
2756 test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002757 play when the regression test is run.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002758
2759 Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work
2760 correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002761 (OSS).
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002762
2763 The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of
2764 crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law
2765 audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the
2766 SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide.
2767
2768- The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was
2769 removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C
2770 readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at
2771 compile-time.
2772
2773- The binascii module is now enabled on Win64.
2774
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +00002775- tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing
2776 programs with very long string literals.
2777
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002778Internals
2779
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002780- Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(),
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002781 which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where
2782 the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all
2783 previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very
2784 long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a
2785 setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in
2786 Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability.
2787
2788- Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were
2789 triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution,
2790 applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call
2791 PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's
2792 container attributes is complete.
2793
2794- pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and
2795 PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which
2796 provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2.
2797
2798- If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of
2799 bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time.
2800
2801- Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage
2802 collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes.
2803
2804- Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini().
2805
2806Build issues
2807
2808- configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002809 executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002810 X, for example.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002811
2812- The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when
2813 possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX.
2814
2815- The md5 file should now compile on all platforms.
2816
2817- The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define
2818 POLLRDNORM and related constants.
2819
2820- Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002821 platform.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002822
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +00002823- BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation
2824 process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files.
2825 dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command
2826 line during build on PPC BeOS.
2827
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002828- Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +00002829 "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002830
2831- Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets.
2832
2833- SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure.
2834
2835Tools and other miscellany
2836
2837- Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze.
2838
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +00002839- IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode
2840 characters.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002841
2842What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)?
2843========================================
2844
2845Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2846
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002847- Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002848 "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002849
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002850- Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and
2851 Python version number and exit immediately.
2852
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002853- eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters.
2854
2855- getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the
2856 attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default
2857 encoding before lookup.
2858
2859- Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds
2860 checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated
2861 string is too long."
2862
2863- Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002864 loop.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002865
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002866
2867Standard library and extensions
2868
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002869- socket module: the OpenSSL code now adds support for RAND_status()
2870 and EGD (Entropy Gathering Device).
2871
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002872- array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002873 argument checking; it still takes no arguments.
2874
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002875- asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002876
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002877- cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002878
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002879- CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002880
2881- ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002882 letters are now correctly converted to lowercase.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002883
2884- copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically.
2885
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002886- cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002887
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002888- cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002889
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +00002890- dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant
2891 `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings
2892 and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine
2893 which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is
2894 now available options.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002895
2896- distutils: Update to version 0.9.3.
2897
2898- dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants.
2899
2900- fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD.
2901
2902- gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects
2903 found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful
2904 for debugging a program that creates reference cycles.
2905
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002906- httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002907 of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not
2908 crash when server sends invalid content-length header.
2909
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002910- mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002911
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002912- marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts
2913 are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable
2914 sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed
2915 that signed right shift sign-extends.)
2916
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002917- operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for
2918 __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002919
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002920- os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where
2921 fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002922
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002923- os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double-
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002924 clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the
2925 DOS "start" command).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002926
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002927- os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002928 os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002929
2930- pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains
2931 a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior
2932 matches cPickle.
2933
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002934- posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002935
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002936- py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002937
2938- readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002939 threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002940 latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002941
2942- rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002943 getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002944
2945- site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002946 standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002947 few cycles during startup since the first call to
2948 setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the
2949 encodings package.
2950
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002951- socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned
2952 by makefile().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002953
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002954- sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not
Jeremy Hylton625915e2000-10-02 13:43:33 +00002955 use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002956 is followed by whitespace.
2957
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002958- StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002959
2960- struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts.
2961
2962- urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002963 quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002964
2965- Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set
2966 event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel.
2967 Removed some debugging prints.
2968
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002969- UserList: now implements __contains__().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002970
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +00002971- webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(),
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002972 which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly
2973 to a Blue Screen freeze.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002974
2975- xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard
2976 XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1.
2977
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002978- xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom
2979 (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM
2980 tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific
2981 application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still
2982 undocumented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002983
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002984- xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler
2985 interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some
2986 documentation is already available.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002987
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002988- pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new,
2989 packagized XML support.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002990
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002991
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002992C API
2993
2994- Add three new convenience functions for module initialization --
2995 PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and
2996 PyModule_AddStringConstant().
2997
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002998- Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002999 removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after
3000 #include of stdio.h.
3001
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003002- Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003003 backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions.
3004
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003005- A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of
3006 either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler
3007 and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef
3008 PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003009
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003010- Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003011 internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default
3012 encoded version of a Unicode object.
3013
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003014- PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects.
3015
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003016- The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003017 exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if
3018 <limits.h> is not available.
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003019
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003020- PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was
3021 effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for
3022 backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is
3023 set to NULL.
3024
3025- PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects
3026 for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above.
3027
3028- A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode.
3029 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es".
3030 PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a
3031 pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003032 UTF-16.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003033
3034- Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code).
3035
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003036
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003037Internals
3038
3039- On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that
3040 it works when argv[0] is a relative path.
3041
Andrew M. Kuchlinga1099be2000-12-15 01:16:43 +00003042- Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003043 unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003044 rather than by generating a copy of the object.
3045
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00003046- Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and
3047 the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003048
Jeremy Hylton97693b02000-09-26 17:42:51 +00003049- In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed
3050 bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set
3051 while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for
3052 platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int).
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003053
3054- Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred
3055 when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not.
3056
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003057- On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in
3058 registry key.
3059
3060- On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003061 condition.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003062
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003063
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003064Build and platform-specific issues
3065
3066- Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option.
3067
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003068- Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension
3069 modules on Reliant UNIX.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003070
3071- Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c:
3072 Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing
3073 prototypes in posixmodule.c.
3074
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003075- Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003076 configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003077
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003078- Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding
3079 define for TELL64.
3080
3081
3082Tools and other miscellany
3083
3084- ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__".
3085
3086- freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes.
3087
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003088- IDLE:
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003089 Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been
3090 created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter
3091 initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit
3092 className parameter to the Tk() constructor.
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003093
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003094
3095What's new in 2.0 beta 1?
3096=========================
3097
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003098Source Incompatibilities
3099------------------------
3100
3101None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2,
3102such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to
3103str(long) and repr(float).
3104
3105
3106Binary Incompatibilities
3107------------------------
3108
3109- Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used
3110with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python
31112.0.
3112
3113- On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
3114Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we
3115can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
3116
3117- Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between
3118releases.
3119
3120
3121Overview of Changes Since 1.6
3122-----------------------------
3123
3124There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through
3125the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list
3126of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed.
3127
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003128The process for making major new changes to the language has changed
3129since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python
3130Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted.
3131
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003132There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more
3133detail below:
3134
3135 - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1
3136
3137 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)]
3138
3139 - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name
3140
3141 - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello"
3142
3143Other important changes:
3144
3145 - Optional collection of cyclical garbage
3146
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003147Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP)
3148---------------------------------
3149
3150PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design
3151document providing information to the Python community, or describing
3152a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical
3153specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
3154
3155We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new
3156features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for
3157documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP
3158author is responsible for building consensus within the community and
3159documenting dissenting opinions.
3160
3161The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003162
3163Augmented Assignment
3164--------------------
3165
3166This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years!
3167Eleven new assignment operators were added:
3168
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003169 += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |=
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003170
3171For example,
3172
3173 A += B
3174
3175is similar to
3176
3177 A = A + B
3178
3179except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something
3180like dict[index].attr).
3181
3182However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus,
3183if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B
3184(except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the
3185same effect as A.extend(B)!
3186
3187Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in
3188order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is
3189used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the
3190in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the
3191method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting
3192an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place
3193__add__.
3194
3195Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters.
3196
3197
3198List Comprehensions
3199-------------------
3200
3201This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed
3202from another list (or lists). The simplest form is:
3203
3204 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>]
3205
Guido van Rossum56db0952000-09-06 23:34:25 +00003206For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9].
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003207This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003208
3209You can also add a condition:
3210
3211 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>]
3212
3213For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list
3214of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003215than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003216
3217You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For
3218example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences::
3219
3220 def flatten(seq):
3221 return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq]
3222
3223 flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []])
3224
3225This prints
3226
3227 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
3228
3229List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003230Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003231
3232
3233Extended Import Statement
3234-------------------------
3235
3236Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different
3237name. This can be accomplished like this:
3238
3239 import foo
3240 bar = foo
3241 del foo
3242
3243but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the
3244import statement now allows this to be written as follows:
3245
3246 import foo as bar
3247
3248There's also a variant for 'from ... import':
3249
3250 from foo import bar as spam
3251
3252This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this:
3253
3254 import test.regrtest as regrtest
3255
3256Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this
3257context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import
3258statement doesn't involve expressions).
3259
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003260Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003261
3262
3263Extended Print Statement
3264------------------------
3265
3266Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print
3267statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file
3268than the default sys.stdout.
3269
3270For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now
3271write:
3272
3273 print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!"
3274
3275As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file
Fred Drake45888ff2000-09-29 17:09:11 +00003276evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used. Thus:
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003277
3278 print >> None, "Hello world"
3279
3280is equivalent to
3281
3282 print "Hello world"
3283
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003284Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003285
3286
3287Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage
3288---------------------------------------
3289
3290Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down
3291cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for
3292reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being
3293correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all
3294their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to
3295each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann,
3296and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer.
3297
3298There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the
3299garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script
3300that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1,
3301it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user
3302experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its
Fred Drake9f11cf82000-09-29 17:54:40 +00003303performance. If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003304off by default in the final 2.0 release.
3305
3306
3307Smaller Changes
3308---------------
3309
3310A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to
3311map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length;
3312i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When
3313the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins:
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003314zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003315
3316sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial).
3317
3318Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default).
3319dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not,
3320it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus:
3321
3322 dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item)
3323
3324does the same work as this common idiom:
3325
3326 if not dict.has_key(key):
3327 dict[key] = []
3328 dict[key].append(item)
3329
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003330There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for
3331indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError.
3332
3333Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U
3334escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003335
3336The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code
3337have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python
3338were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted
3339was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions,
3340e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This
3341limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively
3342fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be
3343limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python.
3344
3345The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python
3346programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This
3347limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by
3348Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from
3349overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is
33501000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found
3351by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003352
3353New Modules and Packages
3354------------------------
3355
3356atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits.
3357
3358imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import
3359hooks.
3360
3361pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul
3362Prescod.
3363
3364xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three
3365subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these
3366would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a
3367user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard
3368xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute
3369backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package.
3370
3371webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser.
3372
3373
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003374Changed Modules
3375---------------
3376
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003377array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and
3378remove
3379
3380binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between
3381binary data and its hex representation
3382
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003383calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control
3384over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead
3385of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week,
3386e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY.
3387
3388cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a
3389dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object.
3390
3391ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option,
3392remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module
3393to be used for writing config files as well as reading them.
3394
3395ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003396optionally support the RFC 959 REST command.
3397
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003398gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003399
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003400httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See
3401the module doc strings for details.
Guido van Rossum830ca2a2000-09-05 15:34:16 +00003402
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003403locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh
3404
3405marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or
3406recursive data structures
3407
3408os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid
3409
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003410os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3
3411support under Unix.
3412
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003413os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003414
3415os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix
3416
3417smtplib -- support for sending very long messages
3418
3419socket -- new function getfqdn()
3420
3421readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files.
3422The readline section of the library reference manual contains an
3423example.
3424
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003425select -- add interface to poll system call
3426
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003427shutil -- new copyfileobj function
3428
3429SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the
3430HTTP server.
3431
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003432Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003433
3434urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration,
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003435e.g. http_proxy.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003436
3437whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003438
3439
3440Obsolete Modules
3441----------------
3442
3443None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete:
3444stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail,
3445poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound.
3446
3447
3448Changed, New, Obsolete Tools
3449----------------------------
3450
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003451None.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003452
3453
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003454C-level Changes
3455---------------
3456
3457Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code.
3458
3459All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the
3460Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable.
3461
3462Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file,
3463pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old
3464header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set
3465of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly;
3466they are all included by Python.h.)
3467
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003468Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003469and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also
3470added large file support for Linux64 and Win64.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003471
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003472The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently
3473use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In
3474previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the
3475concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names,
3476e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility
3477at the API level, but are deprecated.
3478
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003479The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by
3480Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow
3481on Windows.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003482
3483The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object,
3484tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003485the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003486
3487The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003488C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003489
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003490PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of
3491the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change
3492prevents crashes caused by programmer error.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003493
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003494New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003495
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003496PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions
3497that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an
3498extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done.
3499
3500XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here.
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00003501
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003502
3503Windows Changes
3504---------------
3505
3506New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above).
3507
3508os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft
3509Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there
3510is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your
3511Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not
3512a standalone program.
3513
3514Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python
3515on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges,
3516Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
3517Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003518under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal"
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003519uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working
3520(for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly
3521from CGI).
3522
3523[This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk
3524installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the
3525Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this
3526wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with
3527conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python
3528to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files.
3529
3530[This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in
3531\Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\.
3532
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003533
3534Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6
3535--------------------------------------------
3536
3537The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here
3538is some late-breaking news:
3539
3540New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(),
3541and changes to getlocale() and setlocale().
3542
3543The new module is now enabled per default.
3544
3545It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal
3546strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings
3547!) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from
3548cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa.
3549
3550Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA:
3551http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/
3552
3553
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00003554======================================================================