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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000015- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
16 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
17 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
18 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
19 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
20
21- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
22
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000023- Speed up some Unicode operations.
24
25- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
26
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000027- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000028 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
29
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000030- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
31
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000032- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
33 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
34
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000035- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
36
37- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
38
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000039- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
40 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
41 was empty.
42
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000043- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
44 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
45
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000046- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000047 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000048
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000049- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
50 codes.
51
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000052- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
53 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
54 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
55
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000056- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
57 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
58
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000059- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000060 (fixes bug #1119418).
61
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000062- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
63
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000064- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
65 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
66
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000067- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
68 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
69 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
70
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000071- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
72
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000073- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
74 reference counts in some error exit cases.
75
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000076- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
77 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
78 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
79 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
80 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
81 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
82 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
83 realloc.
84
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000085- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
86 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
87
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000088- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
89 like their int counterparts.
90
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000091- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
92 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
93 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
94 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
95 for a longer write-up of the problem).
96
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000097- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
98 serializing floats.
99
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000100- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
101 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
102 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
103
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000104- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
105 278.
106
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000107- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
108 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
109 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
110 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000111 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000112 PyNumber_*().
113 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
114
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000115- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
116 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
117 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
118 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
119
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000120- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
121 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
122 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
123 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
124 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
125
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000126- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
127 disabled caused a crash.
128
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000129- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
130 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
131
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000132- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000133 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
134
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000135- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
136
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000137- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000138 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
139 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
140 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000141
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000142- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
143
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000144- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
145 returning None.
146
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000147- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000148 ('\') with a specific error message.
149
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000150- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
151
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000152- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
153 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
154
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000155- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000156 an ferror() call.
157
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000158- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
159 list.sort().
160
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000161- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
162 (2+3) --> (5).
163
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000164- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
165
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000166- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
167 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000168
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000169- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
170 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
171 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
172
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000173- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
174 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
175 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
176
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177Extension Modules
178-----------------
179
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000180- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
181
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000182- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
183 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
184
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000185- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
186
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000187- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
188 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
189
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000190- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
191
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000192- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
193 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
194
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000195- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
196 returns in cStringIO.c.
197
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000198- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
199 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
200
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000201- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
202
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000203- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
204
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000205- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
206 the file system encoding.
207
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000208- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
209 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000210
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000211- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
212
213- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000214 line without newlines.
215
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000216- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
217 on Windows.
218
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000219- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000220 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
221
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000222- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
223 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
224 for large or negative values.
225
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000226- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000227 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000228
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000229- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
230
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000231- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
232 if available on the platform.
233
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000234- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
235 available on the platform.
236
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000237- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
238 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
239
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000240- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
241
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000242- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
243 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
244 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
245
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000246- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
247
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000248- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
249 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
250
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000251- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000252 file size.
253
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000254- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
255
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000256- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
257 {remove_history,replace_history}
258
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000259- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
260 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000261
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000262- stat_float_times is now True.
263
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000264- array.array objects are now picklable.
265
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000266- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
267 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
268
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000269- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
270 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
271 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
272
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000273- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
274 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000275
276Library
277-------
278
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000279- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
280 is an error in the format string.
281
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000282- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
283
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000284- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000285 "parent" argument.
286
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000287- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
288 for padding.
289
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000290- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
291 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
292
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000293- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
294 to get the correct encoding.
295
296- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
297 languages.
298
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000299- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
300
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000301- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
302
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000303- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
304
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000305- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
306 functionality.
307
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000308- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
309
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000310- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
311 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
312
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000313- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
314 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
315 match the Content-Length header.
316
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000317- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
318
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000319- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
320 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000321 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000322
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000323- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
324
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000325- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
326
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000327- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
328 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
329
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000330- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
331 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
332 Tkdnd.
333
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000334- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
335 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
336
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000337- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
338 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
339
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000340- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000341 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
342
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000343- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
344 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
345
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000346- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
347 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
348
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000349- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000350 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000351
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000352- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
353
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000354- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
355 error messages.
356
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000357- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
358
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000359- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
360 Bug #1224621.
361
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000362- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
363 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
364 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
365 terminates by raising StopIteration.
366
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000367- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
368
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000369- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
370 component of the path.
371
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000372- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
373 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
374 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
375 class at all.
376
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000377- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
378 files to PyPI.
379
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000380- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
381 them to PyPI.
382
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000383- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
384 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
385 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
386 work as expected.
387
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000388- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
389 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
390
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000391- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000392 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
393
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000394- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
395
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000396- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
397 to build.
398
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000399- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
400 symbolic links on Windows.
401
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000402- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000403 profile.py if available.
404
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000405- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
406
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000407- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
408 in LWPCookieJar.
409
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000410- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
411
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000412- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
413
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000414- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
415
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000416- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
417
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000418- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
419
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000420- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
421
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000422- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
423
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000424- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
425
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000426- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
427 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
428 be exploited in various ways.
429
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000430- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
431
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000432- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
433
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000434- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
435
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000436- Enhancements to the csv module:
437
438 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000439 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000440 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000441 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
442 reporting.
443 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
444 dictates.
445 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000446 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000447 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000448 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
449 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000450 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
451 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000452 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000453 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
454 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
455 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
456 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
457 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
458 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
459 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
460 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
461 without first creating a dialect class.
462 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
463 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
464 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000465 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000466 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
467 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000468 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
469 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
470 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
471 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000472 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
473 This has been fixed.
474
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000475- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
476 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
477 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
478 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
479
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000480- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
481
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000482- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
483 (Bug #951915).
484
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000485- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
486 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
487 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000488 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000489
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000490- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
491
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000492- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
493 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
494
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000495- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
496
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000497- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
498
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000499- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
500
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000501- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
502
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000503- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
504
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000505- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
506 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
507 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
508
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000509- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000510 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000511
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000512- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
513 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
514 tokenizer with very long source lines.
515
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000516- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
517 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
518
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000519- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
520 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000521
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000522- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
523 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
524
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000525- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
526 correctly.
527
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000528- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
529 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
530 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
531 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
532 between two lines.
533
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000534- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
535 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
536 handlers.
537
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000538- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000539 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
540 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000541
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000542- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
543 considering it exactly like a '*'.
544
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000545- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
546 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000547
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000548Build
549-----
550
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000551- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
552 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
553
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000554- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
555 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
556
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000557- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
558 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
559 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000560 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000561
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000562- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
563 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
564 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
565
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000566- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
567
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000568- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
569 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
570
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000571- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
572 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
573 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
574 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
575 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
576 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
577 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
578 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
579
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000580- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
581 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
582 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
583 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
584
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000585
586C API
587-----
588
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000589- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
590
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000591- Removed PyRange_New().
592
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000593- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
594 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
595 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
596 mappings.
597
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000598
599Tests
600-----
601
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000602- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000603
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000604
605Documentation
606-------------
607
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000608- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
609
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000610- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
611
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000612- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
613
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000614- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
615
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000616- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
617
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000618- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
619
620- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
621
622- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
623
624- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
625
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000626- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
627 Closes bug #1166582.
628
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000629- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
630 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
631 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
632
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000633Mac
634---
635
636
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000637New platforms
638-------------
639
640- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
641
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000642
643Tools/Demos
644-----------
645
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000646- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
647 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
648 source files that need an encoding declaration.
649 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
650
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000651- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
652
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000653- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000654
655
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000656What's New in Python 2.4 final?
657===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000658
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000659*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000660
661Core and builtins
662-----------------
663
664- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
665 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
666 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
667
668
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000669What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
670==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000671
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000672*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000673
674Core and builtins
675-----------------
676
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000677- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
678 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
679 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
680
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000681
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000682Library
683-------
684
685- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
686 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
687 raised is re-raised.
688
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000689- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
690 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
691
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000692- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
693 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
694 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
695 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
696 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
697 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
698 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
699 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
700 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
701 by the slice are recomputed now.
702
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000703- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000704
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000705Build
706-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000707
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000708- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
709 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
710 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000711
712C API
713-----
714
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000715- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
716
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000717
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000718What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
719================================
720
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000721*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000722
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000723License
724-------
725
726The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
727is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
728changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
729Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
730intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
731durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
732the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
733License::
734
735 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
736
737says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
738to Python 2.1.1.
739
740The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
741License Version 2.
742
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000743Core and builtins
744-----------------
745
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000746- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
747 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
748 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
749 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
750 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
751 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
752 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
753 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
754 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
755 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
756
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000757- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000758
759Extension Modules
760-----------------
761
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000762- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
763 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
764 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
765 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000766
767Library
768-------
769
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000770- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
771 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
772 returned.
773
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000774- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
775
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000776- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
777 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
778
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000779- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
780
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000781- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
782 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000783
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000784- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
785
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000786- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
787
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000788- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000789 the source code is updated and reloaded.
790
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000791Build
792-----
793
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000794- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000795
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000796What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
797================================
798
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000799*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000800
801Core and builtins
802-----------------
803
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000804- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000805 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
806
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000807- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
808 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
809 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
810 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
811
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000812- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
813 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
814
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000815- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
816 constant.
817
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000818- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
819 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
820 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
821 large), and to anomalies such as
822 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
823 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
824 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
825 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000826
827Extension modules
828-----------------
829
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000830- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
831 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000832 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
833 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
834 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000835
836Library
837-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000838
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000839- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000840 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000841 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
842 --swig-cpp.
843
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000844- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
845 it is set.
846
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000847- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000848
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000849- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
850 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
851 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
852 Closes bug #1039270.
853
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000854- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000855
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000856 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000857 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
858 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
859 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
860 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
861 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
862 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
863 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
864 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
865 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
866 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
867 + Updates to documentation.
868
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000869- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
870 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
871 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
872 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
873
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000874- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000875
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000876- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
877 applications should use the getmember function.
878
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000879- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
880
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000881- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
882 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
883 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
884 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
885 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
886 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
887 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
888 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
889 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
890
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000891- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
892 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000893 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000894
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000895- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
896 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
897 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
898 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
899 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
900 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
901 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
902 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000903
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000904- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
905 the new public features (of which there are many).
906
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000907- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000908 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
909 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
910 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
911 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000912 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000913
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000914- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
915
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000916- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
917 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
918 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
919 options.
920
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000921- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
922 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
923 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
924 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
925 conditions under which non-string values work.
926
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000927Build
928-----
929
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000930- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
931 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
932 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
933
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000934- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
935 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
936 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
937 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
938 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000939
940C API
941-----
942
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000943- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
944 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
945
946- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
947
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000948- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
949 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
950 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
951 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
952 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
953 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
954 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
955 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
956 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
957
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000958- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
959
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000960- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
961 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
962 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000963
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000964Tests
965-----
966
967- test__locale ported to unittest
968
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000969Mac
970---
971
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000972- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
973 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
974 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000975
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000976Tools/Demos
977-----------
978
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000979- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
980 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
981 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
982 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
983 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000984
985
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000986What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
987=================================
988
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000989*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000990
991Core and builtins
992-----------------
993
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000994- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000995 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
996
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000997- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
998 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
999 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1000 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1001 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1002 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1003 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1004 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001005 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1006 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1007 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1008 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1009 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001010
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001011- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1012 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1013 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1014 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1015 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1016
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001017- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1018
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001019- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1020 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1021
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001022- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1023 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1024 modified the list.
1025
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001026- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1027 functions is now writable.
1028
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001029- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1030 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1031 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1032 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1033
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001034- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1035 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1036 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1037 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1038 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001039
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001040- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1041 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1042
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001043Extension modules
1044-----------------
1045
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001046- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1047
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001048- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1049 data.
1050
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001051- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1052 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1053 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1054 supposed to have been truncated away.
1055
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001056- Added socket.socketpair().
1057
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001058- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1059 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1060
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001061- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001062 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1063
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001064Library
1065-------
1066
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001067- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001068 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001069
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001070- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1071 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1072
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001073- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1074 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1075
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001076- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1077
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001078- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1079 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001080
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001081- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1082 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1083
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001084- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1085
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001086- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1087
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001088- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1089
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001090- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1091 Percivall.
1092
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001093- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1094 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1095
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001096- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1097 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1098 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001099 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001100
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001101- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1102 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1103 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1104 and exponent.
1105
1106- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1107
1108- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001109 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001110 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1111
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001112- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1113 to the readline module.
1114
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001115- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001116 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1117 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001118
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001119- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1120 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1121 contains symlinks.
1122
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001123- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1124 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1125
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001126- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1127 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1128 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1129
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001130- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1131 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1132 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1133 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1134 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1135 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1136 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1137 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1138 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1139 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1140 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1141 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1142 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1143
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001144- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1145
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001146Tools/Demos
1147-----------
1148
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001149- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1150 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1151
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001152- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1153
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001154Build
1155-----
1156
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001157- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1158 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1159 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1160 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1161 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1162 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1163 plans to do so.
1164
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001165- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1166 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1167
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001168- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1169 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1170
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001171- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1172 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1173
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001174- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1175 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1176
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001177- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1178 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001180C API
1181-----
1182
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001183..
1184
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001185Documentation
1186-------------
1187
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001188- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1189 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1190
1191- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1192 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1193 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001194
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001195New platforms
1196-------------
1197
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001198- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1199
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001200Tests
1201-----
1202
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001203..
1204
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001205Windows
1206-------
1207
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001208- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1209 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1210 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1211 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1212 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1213 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1214 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1215 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1216 the problem.
1217
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001218Mac
1219---
1220
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001221..
1222
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001223
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001224What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1225=================================
1226
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001227*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001228
1229Core and builtins
1230-----------------
1231
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001232- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1233 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1234 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1235 sensitive code.
1236
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001237- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001238 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001239
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001240 @staticmethod
1241 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001242
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001243 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001244
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001245- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1246 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1247 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1248 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1249 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1250 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1251 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1252 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1253 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1254 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1255 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1256
1257 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1258 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1259 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1260 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1261 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1262 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1263 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1264
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001265- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1266 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1267
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001268- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001269 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001270
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001271- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001272 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001273 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1274
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001275- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001276 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1277 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1278
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001279- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1280 types that support garbage collection.
1281
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001282- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1283
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001284- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1285 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1286 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1287 Jython.
1288
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001289- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1290
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001291- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1292 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1293
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001294- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1295 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1296 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001297
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001298- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1299 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1300 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1301
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001302Extension modules
1303-----------------
1304
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001305- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1306
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001307Library
1308-------
1309
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001310- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1311 TIS-620
1312
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001313- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1314 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1315 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1316 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1317 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1318 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1319 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1320 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1321 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1322 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1323
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001324- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1325
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001326- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1327 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1328 same as when the argument is omitted).
1329 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1330
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001331- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1332
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001333- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1334 schemes are offered.
1335
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001336- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1337
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001338- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1339 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1340 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1341
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001342- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1343
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001344- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1345 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1346
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001347- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1348 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1349 when dummy_threading is being used.
1350
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001351- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1352 from a tarfile.
1353
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001354- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001355 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001356
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001357- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1358 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1359 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1360 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1361
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001362- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1363 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1364
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001365- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1366 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1367 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1368 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1369 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1370 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1371 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1372 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1373 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1374 by some other method in progress).
1375
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001376- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1377 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1378 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001379
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001380- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1381
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001382- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1383 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1384 AM Kuchling.
1385
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001386- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1387 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1388 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1389
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001390- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1391 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1392 instead of unsigned.
1393
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001394- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001395 no longer part of the public API.
1396
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001397- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1398 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1399 string methods of the same name).
1400
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001401- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001402 SF patch 945642.
1403
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001404- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1405
1406 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1407
1408 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1409 DocTestSuites.
1410
1411- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1412 that provide thread-local data.
1413
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001414- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1415 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1416
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001417- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1418
1419- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1420 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1421 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1422
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001423- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1424
1425 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1426 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1427 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001428
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001429 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1430 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1431 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1432 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1433
1434 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1435 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1436
1437 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1438 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1439 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1440 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1441
1442 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1443 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1444 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1445 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1446 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1447
1448 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1449 wrapping help output.
1450
1451 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1452 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1453 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001454
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001455C API
1456-----
1457
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001458- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1459 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1460 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1461 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1462 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1463 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1464 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1465 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1466 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1467 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1468 its visible semantics have not changed.
1469
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001470- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1471 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1472
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001473Documentation
1474-------------
1475
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001476- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001477
1478 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001479 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001480
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001481 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001482
1483 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1484
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001485- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001486
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001487Tests
1488-----
1489
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001490- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001491 platforms that use the Makefile.
1492
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001493- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1494 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1495 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1496
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001497
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001498What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1499=================================
1500
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001501*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001502
1503Core and builtins
1504-----------------
1505
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001506- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1507 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1508 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1509 objects now (one object instead of three).
1510
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001511- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1512 Windows DLLs.
1513
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001514- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1515 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001516
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001517- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1518 a new .pyc magic.
1519
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001520- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1521 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1522 be there.
1523
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001524- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1525 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1526 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1527
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001528- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1529 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1530 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1531
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001532- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1533
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001534- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1535 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1536 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001537
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001538- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1539 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1540
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001541- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1542
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001543- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001544 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001545
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001546- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1547
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001548- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1549
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001550- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1551 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1552
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001553- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1554 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1555 Fixes bug #858016 .
1556
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001557- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1558 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1559 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1560
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001561- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1562 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1563 improves their performance (about 35%).
1564
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001565- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1566 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1567 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1568
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001569- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1570 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1571 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1572 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1573
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001574- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1575 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001576 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001577 length is not known).
1578
1579- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1580 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001581 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1582 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001583 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1584
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001585- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1586 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1587
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001588- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1589 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1590 keyword arguments.
1591
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001592- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1593 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1594 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1595
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001596- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1597 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1598 cases.
1599
1600- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1601 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1602 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1603 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1604 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1605 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1606 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1607 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1608 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1609 a release build.
1610
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001611- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1612 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1613
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001614- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001615 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001616
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001617- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1618 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1619 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1620 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1621 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1622 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1623 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1624 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1625 destroyed.
1626
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001627- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1628 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1629 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1630 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1631 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1632 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1633 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1634 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1635
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001636- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1637 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1638 character other than a space.
1639
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001640- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1641 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1642 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1643 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1644 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1645 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1646 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1647 attributes with the same name.
1648
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001649- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1650 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1651 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1652 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1653 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1654 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1655 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1656 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1657 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1658 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1659 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1660 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1661 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1662 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001663
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001664- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1665 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1666 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1667 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1668 This has been repaired.
1669
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001670- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1671
1672- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1673
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001674- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1675 over a sequence.
1676
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001677- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001678 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001679
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001680- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1681
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001682- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1683 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1684 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1685 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1686 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1687 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1688 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1689 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1690
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001691- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1692 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1693 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1694
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001695- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1696 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1697 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1698 freelist.
1699
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001700- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1701 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1702
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001703- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1704 number.
1705
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001706- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1707 a TypeError exception.
1708
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001709- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1710 820195.
1711
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001712- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1713 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1714 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1715
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001716- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001717 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1718 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001719
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001720- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1721 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1722 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1723
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001724- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1725 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001726 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001727
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001728- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001729 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1730 the first call.
1731
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001732
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001733Extension modules
1734-----------------
1735
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001736- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1737 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1738
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001739- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1740 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1741 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1742 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1743 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1744 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1745 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001746
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001747- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1748
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001749- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1750
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001751- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1752 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1753
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001754- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1755 fewer false positives.
1756
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001757- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1758 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1759
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001760- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001761 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1762
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001763- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001764 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001765 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001766 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1767 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001768
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001769- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1770 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1771 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1772 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1773
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001774- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1775 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1776 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1777 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1778 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1779 #897625.
1780
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001781- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1782 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1783
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001784- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1785 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1786 and pops on either side of the deque.
1787
1788- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1789 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1790
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001791- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1792 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1793 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1794 other functions that expect a function argument.
1795
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001796- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1797
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001798- os.getsid was added.
1799
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001800- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1801 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1802 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1803
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001804- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1805
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001806- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1807
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001808- readline.clear_history was added.
1809
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001810- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1811
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001812- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1813
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001814- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1815
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001816- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1817
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001818- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1819
1820- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1821
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001822- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1823
1824- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1825
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001826- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1827 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1828 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1829
1830- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1831 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1832 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1833 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1834 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1835 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1836 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1837
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001838- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1839 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1840 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1841 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001842
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001843- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001844 iterators from a single iterable.
1845
1846- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1847 of raising a TypeError exception.
1848
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001849- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1850 as parameter.
1851
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001852Library
1853-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001854
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001855- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1856
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001857- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1858 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1859 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001860
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001861- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1862 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1863 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001864
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001865- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001866
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001867- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1868 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001869
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001870- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1871 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1872
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001873- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1874
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001875- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001876 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001877
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001878- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001879 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001880
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001881- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1882
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001883- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1884 on cygwin and mingw32.
1885
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001886- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1887
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001888- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1889 module.
1890
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001891- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1892 installation scheme for all platforms.
1893
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001894- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001895 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001896
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001897- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1898 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1899 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1900
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001901- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1902 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1903 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1904
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001905- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1906
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001907- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1908
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001909- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1910 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1911
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001912- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1913 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1914 type pattern with the same value exists.
1915
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001916- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1917 when run from the command prompt).
1918
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001919- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1920 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1921
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001922- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1923 default sort).
1924
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001925- Added global runctx function to profile module
1926
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001927- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1928
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001929- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1930
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001931- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1932
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001933- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001934 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1935 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1936 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1937 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1938 accordingly.
1939
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001940- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1941 decoding standards.
1942
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001943- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1944 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1945 called for all requests.
1946
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001947- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1948 they are passed to the compiler.
1949
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001950- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1951 indent, width and depth.
1952
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001953- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1954 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1955
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001956- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1957 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1958
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001959- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1960
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001961- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1962
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001963- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1964
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001965- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1966 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1967
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001968- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001969 for better performance.
1970
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001971- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001972
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001973- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1974 a string).
1975
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001976- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1977
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001978- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1979
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001980- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1981
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001982- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1983
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001984- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1985 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1986 list of fieldnames.
1987
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001988- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1989 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1990
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001991- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1992
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001993- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1994 empty lists.
1995
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001996- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1997 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1998 and shelves.
1999
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002000- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2001 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2002
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002003- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002004 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2005 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002006
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002007- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2008 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002009 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002010
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002011- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002012 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2013 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2014
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002015- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2016 and removed in Py2.4.
2017
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002018- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2019
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002020- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2021
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002022Tools/Demos
2023-----------
2024
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002025- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2026 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2027
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002028- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2029
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002030- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2031 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2032 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2033 destination in situations where both files are given.
2034
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002035- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2036 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2037 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2038 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2039
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002040- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2041
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002042- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2043 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2044 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2045 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2046 now.
2047
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002048- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2049 in effect
2050
2051- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2052 C-c C-h
2053
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002054- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2055 -d option was given.
2056
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002057Build
2058-----
2059
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002060- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2061 build under OS X.
2062
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002063- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2064 --enable-profiling.
2065
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002066- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2067 is configured --with-tsc.
2068
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002069- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2070 on AMD64.
2071
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002072- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2073 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2074
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002075- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2076 removed.
2077
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002078- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2079 supported (see PEP 11).
2080
2081- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2082
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002083- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2084
2085- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2086 (see PEP 11).
2087
2088- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2089 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2090
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002091C API
2092-----
2093
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002094- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2095 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2096 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2097
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002098- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2099 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2100 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2101 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2102
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002103- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2104 generator objects.
2105
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002106- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2107 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002108 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2109 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002110
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002111- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2112 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2113
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002114- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2115 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2116 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2117 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2118 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2119
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002120- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2121 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2122 about 10% faster.
2123
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002124- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2125 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2126
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002127- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2128 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2129 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2130 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2131
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002132Windows
2133-------
2134
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002135- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2136 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2137 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2138 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2139
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002140- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2141 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2142 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2143
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002144
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002145What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2146===============================
2147
2148*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2149
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002150IDLE
2151----
2152
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002153- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2154 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2155 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2156 context-menu actions.
2157
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002158- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2159 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2160 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2161 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2162 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2163 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2164 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2165 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2166 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2167
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002168
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002169What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2170=============================================
2171
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002172*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002173
2174Core and builtins
2175-----------------
2176
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002177- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002178 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002179 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2180
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002181Extension modules
2182-----------------
2183
2184- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2185 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2186 than once. This has been fixed.
2187
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002188- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2189 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2190 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2191 call.
2192
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002193- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2194
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002195Library
2196-------
2197
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002198- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2199 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2200
2201- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2202 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2203 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2204 restored.
2205
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002206IDLE
2207----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002208
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002209- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002210
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002211Build
2212-----
2213
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002214- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2215 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2216
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002217C API
2218-----
2219
2220Windows
2221-------
2222
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002223- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2224 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2225
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002226- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2227
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002228Mac
2229---
2230
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002231- Various fixes to pimp.
2232
2233- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2234
2235- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2236 more problems than it solves.
2237
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002238
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002239What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2240=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002241
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002242*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2243
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002244Core and builtins
2245-----------------
2246
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002247- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2248 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002250- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2251 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002252 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002253
2254- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2255 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2256 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002257 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002258
2259- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2260 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002261
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002262- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2263 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2264 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2265
2266- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002267 770247.
2268
2269- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002270
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002271Extension modules
2272-----------------
2273
2274- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2275 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2276
2277- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2278
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002279- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2280
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002281- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2282 contained within the _strptime module.
2283
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002284- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2285 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2286
2287- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2289
2290- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2291 the find_class attribute, if present.
2292
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002293- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002294
2295 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2296 (SF bug 763298).
2297
2298 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002299 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2300 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2301 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002302
2303 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2304
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002305Library
2306-------
2307
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002308- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2309
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002310- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2311 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2312 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2313 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2314 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2315 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2316 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2317 or Tester().
2318
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002319- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2320 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2321 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2322 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2323 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2324 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2325 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2326 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2327 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002330
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002331- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2332 weren't before was an oversight.
2333
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002334- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2335 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2336
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002337- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2338 when there are no lines.
2339
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002340- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2341 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2344 to child processes.
2345
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002346- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2347
2348- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2349
2350- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2351 xmlrpclib.
2352
2353- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2354 responses.
2355
2356- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2357 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2358
2359- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2360 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2361 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2362
2363- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2364 used as patterns.
2365
2366- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2367 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2368 than Tk 8.3.
2369
2370- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2371
2372- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002373
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002374Tools/Demos
2375-----------
2376
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002377- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2378
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002379- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002381- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002382
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002383Build
2384-----
2385
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002386- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2387
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002388- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2389
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002390- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2391 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002392
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002393- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2394 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2395 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002396
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002397C API
2398-----
2399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002400- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2401 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2402
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002403Windows
2404-------
2405
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002406- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2407 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2408 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2409 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2410 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2411 Python exception ::
2412
2413 thread.error: can't start new thread
2414
2415 is raised now.
2416
2417- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2418 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2419 instead of from DLL teardown.
2420
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002421Mac
2422---
2423
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002424- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002425 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002426 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2427 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2428 the executable in the bundle.
2429
2430- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002431
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002432- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2433
2434- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2435 on Panther.
2436
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002437What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2438================================
2439
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002440*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002441
2442Core and builtins
2443-----------------
2444
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002445- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2446 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2447 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2448 with the -i option.
2449
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002450- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2451 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2452
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002453- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2454 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2455
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002456- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2457 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2458 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2459 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2460 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2461 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2462 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2463 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2464 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2465 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2466 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2467 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2468 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002469
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002470- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2471 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2472 embedded in a lambda expression.
2473
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002474- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2475 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2476 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2477 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2478 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2479
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002480- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2481 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2482 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2483
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002484- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2485 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2486
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002487- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2488 It's writable again.
2489
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002490- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2491 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2492 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002493 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002494
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002495- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2496 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2497 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2498
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002499Extension modules
2500-----------------
2501
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002502- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2503 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2504
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002505- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2506 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2507 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2508 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2509
2510- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2511 collection.
2512
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002513- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2514 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2515 unique within a single program run.
2516
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002517- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2518 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2519
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002520- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2521 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2522
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002523- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2524 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002525
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002526- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2527
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002528- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2529 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2530
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002531- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2532 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2533 for many BSD-derived systems.
2534
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002535
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002536Library
2537-------
2538
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002539- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2540 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2541 primary ones:
2542
2543 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2544 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2545 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2546
2547 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2548 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2549 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2550 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2551 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2552 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2553
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002554- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2555 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2556 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2557 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2558 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2559 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2560 argument.
2561
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002562- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2563 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2564 in the archive.
2565
2566- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2567 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2568
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002569- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2570 569574).
2571
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002572- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2573 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2574 no more.
2575
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002576- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2577 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2578 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2579 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2580 code coverage.
2581
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002582- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2583 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2584 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002585 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2586 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002587
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002588- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2589 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2590 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002591 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002592
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002593- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2594
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002595- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2596 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2597 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2598 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2599
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002600- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2601 handling.
2602
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002603- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2604 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2605
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002606- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2607 in socket.py.
2608
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002609- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2610
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002611- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2612 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2613 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2614 opener with proxy support.
2615
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002616- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2617
2618- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2619
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002620Tools/Demos
2621-----------
2622
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002623- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2624
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002625- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2626
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002627- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2628 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002629
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002630- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2631 files.
2632
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002633Build
2634-----
2635
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002636- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002637 different root directory.
2638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002639C API
2640-----
2641
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002642- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2643 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2644 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2645 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2646 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2647 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2648 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2649 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2650 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2651 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2652
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002653- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2654 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2655 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2656 from Python.
2657
2658
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002659New platforms
2660-------------
2661
2662None this time.
2663
2664Tests
2665-----
2666
2667- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2668 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2669
2670Windows
2671-------
2672
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002673- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2674
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002675- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2676 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2677 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2678 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2679 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2680 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2681 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2682 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2683 that's what it's for.
2684
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002685Mac
2686---
2687
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002688- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2689 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2690 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2691 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002692- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2693 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2694- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002695
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002696SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2697------------------------------------
2698
2699430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2700598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2701622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2702661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2703683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2704697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2705713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2706724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2707727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2708729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2709730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2710731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2711732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2712733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2713735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2714740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2715744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2716745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2717747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2718749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2719751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2720753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2721755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2722757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2723760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2724
2725
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002726What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2727================================
2728
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002729*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002730
2731Core and builtins
2732-----------------
2733
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002734- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2735 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2736
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002737- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2738 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2739 and cannot be strings).
2740
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002741- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2742 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2743 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2744 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2745
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002746- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2747 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2748 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2749 Python itself.
2750
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002751- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2752 the referenced object, if it has one.
2753
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002754- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2755 the thread started at
2756 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2757
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002758- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2759 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2760 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2761 placed on a list index.
2762
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002763- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2764 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2765 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2766 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2767
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002768- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2769 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2770 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2771 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2772 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2773 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2774 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2775
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002776- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2777 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2778 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2779 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2780 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2781
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002782- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2783 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002784
2785- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2786 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2787 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2788 #693195.)
2789
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002790- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2791 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002792
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002793- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002794 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002795 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2796 interpreter executions, would fail.
2797
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002798- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002799 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002800 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002801
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002802Extension modules
2803-----------------
2804
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002805- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2806 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2807 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2808 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2809
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002810- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2811 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2812
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002813- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2814 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2815 and Greg Chapman.)
2816
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002817- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2818 recursively.
2819
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002820- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002821 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2822 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2823 leaks.
2824
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002825- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2826
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002827- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2828 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2829 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2830 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2831 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2832 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2833 #705836.
2834
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002835- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002836 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2837
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002838- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2839 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2840 See SF bug #692416.
2841
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002842- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2843 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2844
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002845- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2846 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2847 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002848
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002849- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002850 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2851 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2852
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002853- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2854 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2855 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2856 timeouts to work properly.
2857
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002858Library
2859-------
2860
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002861- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2862 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2863 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2864 future release.
2865
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002866- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2867 for querying platform dependent features.
2868
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002869- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002870
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002871- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2872 pickle protocol versions.
2873
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002874- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2875 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2876 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2877
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002878- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2879
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002880- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2881 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2882 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2883 modules.
2884
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002885- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2886 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2887 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2888
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002889- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2890 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2891
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002892- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2893 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2894 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2895
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002896- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002897 MS Office extensions.
2898
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002899- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2900 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2901
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002902- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2903 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2904
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002905- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2906 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2907 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2908 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2909 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2910 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2911
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002912- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2913 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2914 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002915
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002916- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2917 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2918 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2919
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002920- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2921
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002922- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2923 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2924 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2925
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002926Tools/Demos
2927-----------
2928
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002929- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2930 See the module docstring for details.
2931
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002932Build
2933-----
2934
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002935- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2936 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002937
2938C API
2939-----
2940
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002941- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2942
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002943- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2944 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2945 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2946
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002947- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2948 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002949
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002950 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2951 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2952 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002953
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002954- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002955 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2956
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002957- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2958 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2959 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002960
2961New platforms
2962-------------
2963
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002964None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002965
2966Tests
2967-----
2968
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002969- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2970 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002971
2972Windows
2973-------
2974
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002975- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2976 function.
2977
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002978- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2979 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002980
2981Mac
2982---
2983
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002984- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2985 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002986
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002987- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2988 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002989
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002990- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2991 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2992 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002993
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002994- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002995 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2996 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002997
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002998- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2999 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003000
3001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003002What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3003=================================
3004
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003005*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003006
3007Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003008-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003009
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003010- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3011 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3012 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3013
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003014- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3015 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3016 (SF patch #664376.)
3017
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003018- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3019 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3020 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3021 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3022 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3023 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003024 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003025
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003026- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3027 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3028 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3029 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003030 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003031
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003032- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3033 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3034 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3035 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3036 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3037 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3038 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3039 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3040 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3041 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3042 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3043
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003044- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3045 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3046 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3047 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3048 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3049 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3050
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003051- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3052 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3053
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003054- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3055 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3056 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3057 case.)
3058
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003059- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3060 passed as unicode strings.
3061
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003062- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3063 See SF bug #683467.
3064
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003065- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3066 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3067
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003068- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3069
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003070- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3071
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003072- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3073 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3074 arguments.
3075
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003076- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3077 See SF bug #667147.
3078
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003079- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003080 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003081 See SF bug #676155.
3082
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003083- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003084 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003085 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3086 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3087 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3088 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3089 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3090 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003091
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003092Extension modules
3093-----------------
3094
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003095- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3096 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3097 tp_as_number pointer.
3098
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003099- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3100 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3101 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3102 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3103 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3104
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003105- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3106
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003107- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3108
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003109- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003110 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003111 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3112 patch #678531.)
3113
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003114- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3115 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3116
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003117- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3118 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3119
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003120- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3121
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003122- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3123 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3124 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3125
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003126- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3127
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003128- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3129 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3130
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003131- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003132
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003133- datetime changes:
3134
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003135 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3136
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003137 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3138 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3139 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3140 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3141 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3142 now.
3143
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003144 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003145 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3146 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003147
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003148 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003149 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003150 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3151 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3152 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3153 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003154
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003155 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3156 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3157 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003158 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3159
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003160 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3161 by a later example coded by Guido.
3162
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003163 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003164 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3165 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3166 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003167 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3168 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3169
3170 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3171 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3172 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3173 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3174 tzinfo subclass instance.
3175
3176 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3177 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3178 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3179 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3180 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3181 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3182 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3183 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003184
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003185 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3186 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3187 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3188 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3189 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003190 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3191
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003192 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003193
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003194 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3195 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3196 as a naive datetime object.
3197
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003198 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3199 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3200 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3201
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003202 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3203 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3204 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3205 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3206 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3207 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3208 comparison.
3209
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003210 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3211 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3212 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3213 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003214 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003215
3216 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003217
3218 and ::
3219
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003220 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3221
3222 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3223 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3224 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3225 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3226
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003227 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3228 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3229 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3230 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3231 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3232
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003233 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3234 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003235 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3236 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003237
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003238Library
3239-------
3240
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003241- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3242 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3243
3244- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3245 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3246 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3247 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3248 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3249 See PEP 307 for details.
3250
3251- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3252 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3253
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003254- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3255 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003256 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003257 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3258 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003259 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003260
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003261- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3262 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3263
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003264- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3265 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3266 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3267
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003268- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3269
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003270- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3271 exception.
3272
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003273- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3274 class.
3275
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003276- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3277 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3278 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3279
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003280- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3281 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3282
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003283- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003284 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3285 See SF bug #659228.
3286
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003287- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3288 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3289 See SF patch #651082.
3290
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003291- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003292
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003293- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3294 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3295
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003296- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003297 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003298
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003299- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3300 DOS paths from other platforms.
3301
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003302Tools/Demos
3303-----------
3304
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003305- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3306 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3307 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3308 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3309 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3310 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3311 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3312 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3313 example:
3314
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003315 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3316 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003317
3318 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3319
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003320
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003321Build
3322-----
3323
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003324- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3325 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3326 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003327 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3328
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003329 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3330
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003331- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3332 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3333 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3334 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3335 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3336 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3337 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3338 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3339 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3340
3341- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3342 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3343 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3344 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3345
3346- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3347 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003349C API
3350-----
3351
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003352- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3353 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003354
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003355- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3356 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3357 tp_as_number pointer.
3358
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003359- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3360 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3361 (SF #681367)
3362
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003363- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3364 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3365 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3366 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003368Tests
3369-----
3370
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003371- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003372 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3373 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3374 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3375 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3376 pydoc.)
3377
3378- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3379
3380- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003381
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003382Windows
3383-------
3384
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003385- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3386 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3387 time).
3388
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003389- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3390 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3391
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003392- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3393 release without strong cryptography.
3394
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003395- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003396 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003397
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003398- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3399 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3400
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003401Mac
3402---
3403
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003404- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3405 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003406
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003407- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3408 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3409 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003410
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003411- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3412 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003413
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003414- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3415 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3416 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3417 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003418
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003419- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003420 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3421 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3422 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003423
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003424
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003425What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003426=================================
3427
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003428*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003430Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003432
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003433- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3434
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003435- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3436 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003437 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003438 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003439 a different meaning than before.
3440
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003441- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003442 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003443 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003444
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003445- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003446 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003447 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003448
3449- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3450 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3451 and deallocation.
3452
3453- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3454 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3455
3456- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3457 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3458 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3459 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3460 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3461
3462- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3463 now detected by the garbage collector.
3464
3465- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3466 [SF bug 519621]
3467
3468- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3469 identifier.
3470
3471- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3472 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3473 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3474 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3475 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3476 [SF bug 563060]
3477
3478- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3479 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3480 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3481 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3482 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3483
3484- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3485 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3486 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3487
3488- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3489
3490- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3491 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3492 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3493 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3494 state of the slots would be lost.)
3495
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003496Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003498
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003499- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003500 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3501 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3502 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3503 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003504 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3505 Jython 2.1.
3506
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003507- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003508 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003509 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3510 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3511 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3512 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3513 these, see PEP 302.
3514
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003515- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3516 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3517 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3518
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003519- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3520 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3521 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3522
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003523- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3524 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3525 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3526
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003527- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3528 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3529 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3530 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3531 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3532 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3533 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3534 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3535 releases or implementations.
3536
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003537- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003538 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3539 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003540
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003541- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3542 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3543
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003544- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3545 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3546 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3547
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003548- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3549 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3550
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003551- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3552 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003553 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3554 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003555
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003556- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3557 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3558 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3559 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3560 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3561
3562 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3563 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3564 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3565 pattern.
3566
3567 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3568 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3569 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3570 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3571
3572 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3573 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3574 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3575 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3576 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3577 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3578
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003579- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3580 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3581 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3582 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3583 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3584 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3585 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3586 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003587
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003588- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3589 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3590 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3591 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3592 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003593 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3594 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3595 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3596 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3597 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3598 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3599 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003600
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003601- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3602 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3603
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003604- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3605 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3606 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3607 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3608 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3609 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3610 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3611 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3612 to Zack Weinberg!
3613
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003614- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3615 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3616 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3617 type. This has been fixed now.
3618
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003619- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3620 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3621 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3622
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003623- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3624 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3625 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3626 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3627 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3628 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3629 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3630 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003631 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003632
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003633- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3634 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3635 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003636
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003637- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3638 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3639 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3640 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3641 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3642 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3643 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3644 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003645 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003646 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3647 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3648
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003649- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3650 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3651 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3652 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3653 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3654 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3655 this.)
3656
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003657- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3658 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003659 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003660 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003661 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3662 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003663 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3664 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003665
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003666- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3667 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3668 currently running.
3669
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003670- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3671 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3672 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3673 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3674
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003675- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3676 as directory names.
3677
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003678- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3679 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3680
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003681- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3682 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3683
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003684- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003685 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3686 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003687
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003688- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3689 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3690 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3691 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3692 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3693
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003694- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3695 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3696 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3697 removed.
3698
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003699- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3700 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3701 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3702
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003703- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3704 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3705 to __debug__.
3706
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003707- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3708 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3709 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3710
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003711- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3712 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3713 deprecated now.
3714
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003715- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3716 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3717 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003718
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003719- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3720 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3721 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3722 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3723 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003724
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003725- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3726 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3727
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003728- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3729 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3730 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003731 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003732 is backward compatible.
3733
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003734- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3735 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3736 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3737 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3738 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3739
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003740- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3741 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3742 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3743 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3744 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3745 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003746
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003747- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3748 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3749
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003750- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3751 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3752
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003753- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3754 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3755 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3756 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3757 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3758
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003759- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3760 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3761 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3762
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003763- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003764 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3765
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003766- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3767 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3768 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003769
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003770- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3771 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3772
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003773- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3774 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3775 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3776
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003777- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3778
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003779Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003781
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003782- Added three operators to the operator module:
3783 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3784 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3785 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3786
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003787- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3788
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003789- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3790 archives.
3791
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003792- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3793 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3794 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3795
3796 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3797
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003798- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3799 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3800 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003801 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003802
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003803- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3804 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3805 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3806 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003807 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3808 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3809 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3810 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003811
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003812- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3813 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003814
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003815- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3816
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003817- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3818 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3819
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003820- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3821 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3822 supported.
3823
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003824- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3825
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003826- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3827 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003828
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003829- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3830 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3831
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003832- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3833
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003834- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3835 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3836
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003837- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3838 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3839 functions but callable type objects.
3840
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003841- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003842 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003843 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003844
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003845- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3846 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003847
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003848- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3849 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003850
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003851- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3852 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3853 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3854 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3855
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003856- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3857 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003858
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003859- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3860 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3861 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3862 and __imul__.
3863
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003864- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003865 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3866 is called.
3867
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003868- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3869 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3870 interpreter was compiled.
3871
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003872- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3873 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3874 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003875 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003876 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3877 1, not 2.
3878
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003879- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3880 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3881 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3882 limit.
3883
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003884- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3885 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3886 bug #623464.
3887
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003888- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3889 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3890 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3891 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3892
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003895
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003896- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3897
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003898- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3899 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3900 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3901 with Python 2.3a2.
3902
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003903- os.path exposes getctime.
3904
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003905- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003906 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003907 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003908 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909 unit tests of floating point results.
3910
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003911- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3912 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3913 has been increased.
3914
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003915- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3916 executed.
3917
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003918- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3919 postinstallation script.
3920
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003921- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3922 test the current module.
3923
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003924- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003925 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3926 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3927 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3928 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3929
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003930- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003931 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003932 Ward's Optik package.
3933
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003934- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3935 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3936 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3937 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3938
3939- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3940 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003941 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003942
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003943- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3944 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3945 shelf are binary pickles.
3946
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003947- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3948 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3949
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003950- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3951 modules are iterators now.
3952
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003953- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3954 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3955 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3956 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3957 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3958 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003959
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003960- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3961 with their entity value.
3962
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003963- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3964
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003965- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3966 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003967
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003968- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3969 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003970 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003971
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003972- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3973 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3974 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3975 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3976 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3977 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3978 main():
3979
3980 import locale
3981 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3982
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003983- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3984 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3985
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003986- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3987 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3988 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3989 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3990 to the new standard.
3991
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003992- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3993 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3994 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3995 an extension to the database.
3996
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003997- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3998 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3999 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4000 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004001 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004002
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004003- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004004 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004005
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004006- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4007 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4008 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4009 bounded integers.
4010
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004011- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4012 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4013 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4014 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4015 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4016 in existence.
4017
4018 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4019 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4020 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4021 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4022 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4023 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4024
4025 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4026 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4027 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4028 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4029
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004030- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4031 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4032 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4033
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004034- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4035
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004036- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4037 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4038 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4039 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4040
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004041- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4042 argument.
4043
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004044- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4045 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4046 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4047 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4048 [SF patch 560794].
4049
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004050- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4051 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4052 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004053 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4054 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4055 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004056
4057- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4058 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004059
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004060- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4061 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4062 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4063 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004064
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004065- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4066 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4067 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4068 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4069 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4070
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004071- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004072
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004073- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4074
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004075- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4076 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4077 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4078 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4079 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4080 identical to None.
4081
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004082- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4083 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4084 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4085 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4086 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4087 results now.
4088
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004089- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4090 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4091
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004092- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4093 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4094 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4095 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4096 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4097 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4098 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4099 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4100
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004101- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4102
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004103- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4104 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4105
4106- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4107 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4108 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4109 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4110 and other systems.
4111
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004112- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4113 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4114 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4115 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00004116 work well with these.
4117
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004118- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4119
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004120- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004121 connections.
4122
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004123- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4124 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4125 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4126
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004127- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4128 sets
4129
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004130- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4131 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4132 name.
4133
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004134- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4135 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4136 passed in.
4137
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004138- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004139 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004140 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4141 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004142
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004143- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4144
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004145- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4146
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004147- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4148 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4149 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4150
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004151- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4152 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4153 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4154 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004155 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004156
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004157- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004158 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004159 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004160
4161- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4162 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4163 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4164
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004165- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004166 the value of its expression argument.
4167
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004168- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4169 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4170 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4171
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004172- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4173 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4174 skipstone browser was included.
4175
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004176- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4177 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4178
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004179Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004181
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004182- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4183 names in addition to accepting file names.
4184
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004185- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4186 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4187 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4188 still used and useful.)
4189
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004190- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4191 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4192 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4193 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004194
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004195- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4196 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4197 the generated binary.
4198
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004199Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004201
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004202- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4203
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004204- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4205 except in the hands of experts.
4206
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004207- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004208 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4209 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4210 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004211
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004212- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4213 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4214 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4215 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4216 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4217 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4218 builds.
4219
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004220- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4221 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4222 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4223 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4224 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4225 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4226 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4227 new type.
4228
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004229- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004230
4231 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4232 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4233 positive infinities.
4234
4235 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4236 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4237 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4238 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4239 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4240 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4241 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4242
4243 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4244
4245 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4246
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004247- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4248 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4249 size of the executable.
4250
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004251- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4252 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4253 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4254 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004255
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004256- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4257
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004258- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4259 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4260 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004261
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004262- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4263 well as Unix.
4264
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004265- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4266 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4267 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4268 modules in the README file for details.
4269
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004270C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004273- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4274 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004275 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004276 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004277 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004278
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004279- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4280 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4281 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4282 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4283 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4284 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004285 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004286 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4287 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4288 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4289 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4290 aligned.)
4291
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004292- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4293 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4294 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4295
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004296- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4297 level.
4298
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004299- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4300 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4301 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4302 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4303 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4304
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004305- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4306 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4307 code.
4308
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004309- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4310 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4311 adjusting for negative indices.
4312
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004313- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4314 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4315 object.
4316
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004317- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4318 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4319 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4320
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004321- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4322 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004323
4324- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4325
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004326- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4327 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4328 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4329 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4330
4331- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4332
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004333- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004334
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004335- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004336 without going through the buffer API.
4337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004339
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004340- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4341 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4342 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4343 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4344
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004345- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4346 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4347
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004348- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004349 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004351New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004353
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004354- OpenVMS is now supported.
4355
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004356- AtheOS is now supported.
4357
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004358- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4359
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004360- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----
4364
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004365- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4366 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4367 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004368
4369Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004371
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004372- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4373 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4374 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4375 bugs.
4376 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004377 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004378 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4379 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004380 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004381
4382- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004383 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004384
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004385- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4386 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4387
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004388- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4389 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004390 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004391 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4392
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004393- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4394 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4395 use files" uninstall option).
4396
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004397- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4398
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004399- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4400 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4401
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004402- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4403 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4404 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4405
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004406- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4407 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4408 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4409 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4410 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004411 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4412 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4413 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004414
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004415- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004416 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004417 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4418 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4419 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4420 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4421 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4422 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4423 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4424 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4425 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4426 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4427 work around.
4428
4429- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4430 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4431 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4432 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4433 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4434 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4435 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4436 specified with O_CREAT too).
4437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439----
4440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004441- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004442
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004443- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4444 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4445 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004447- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4448 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4449 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4450
4451- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4452 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4453 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4454 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4455 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4456 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4457 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4458 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004459
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004460- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4461 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4462 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004464- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4465 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4466 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4467 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4468 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004470- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4471 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4472 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004473
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004474- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4475 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004476
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004477- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4478 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4479 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4480 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4481 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004482
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004483- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4484 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4485 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4486
4487- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4488 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4489 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004490
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004491- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4492 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4493 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4494 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004495 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004496
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004497- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4498 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004499
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004500- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4501 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004502
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004503- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004504 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004505 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4506 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004507
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004508
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004509What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004510===============================
4511
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4513
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004514Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004516
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004517- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4518 with a custom metaclass.
4519
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004520Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004522
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004523- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4524 are proxies.
4525
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004526Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004528
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004529- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4530 very short strings.
4531
4532- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4533 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4534 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4535 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4536 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4537
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004538Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004540
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004541- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4542 close or delete time).
4543
4544- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4545 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4546
4547- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4548
4549- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004550 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004552Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004554
4555Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004557
4558C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004560
4561New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004563
4564Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004566
4567Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004569
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004570- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4571
4572- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4573 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4574
4575- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4576 deleted at process exit time.
4577
4578- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4579 in backslash.
4580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004581Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004584- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4585 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4586 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4587
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004588
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004589What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004590===========================
4591
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4593
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004594Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004596
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004597- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4598 been extensively updated. See
4599
4600 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4601
4602 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4603
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004604- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4605 deleted!
4606
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004607- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4608 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4609 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4610 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4611 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4612
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004613- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4614
4615 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4616 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4617
4618 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4619 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4620 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4621 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4622 supported anyway.
4623
4624 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4625 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4626
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004627- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4628 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4629 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4630 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4631 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004632
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004633- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4634 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4635 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4636
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004639
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004640- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4641 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4642 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4643 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4644 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4645 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004646 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4647 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4648 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4649 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004650
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004651- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4652 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4653 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4654
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004658- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4659
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004660Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004662
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004663- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4664 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4665 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4666 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4667 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4668 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4669
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004670- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4671
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004672- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4673
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004674- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4675
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004676- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4677 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4678 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4679
4680- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4681
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004682Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004684
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004685- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4686 off a search on Google.
4687
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004688Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004690
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004691- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4692 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4693 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4694 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4695 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4696 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4697 other platforms should do likewise.
4698
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004699- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4700 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4701 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4702
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004703C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004705
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004706- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4707 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4708 producing key-value pairs.
4709
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004710- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004711 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004712 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4713 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4714 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4715 previously went unchallenged.
4716
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004717New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004719
4720Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004722
4723Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004725
4726Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004728
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004729- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4730 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004731
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004732- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4733 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4734 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4735 home.
4736
4737
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004738What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004739===========================
4740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004745
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004746- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4747 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004748
4749 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004750 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004751
4752 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4753 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004754 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004755 This needs to be documented.
4756
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004757- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4758 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4759
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004760- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4761 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4762 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4763
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004764- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4765 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4766
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004767- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4768 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4769 class forbids it).
4770
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004771- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4772 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4773 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4774
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004775- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4776
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004777Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004779
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004780- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4781 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004782 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004783
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004784- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4785 (like 1 + '').
4786
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004787Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004790- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4791 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4792 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4793 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004794 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004795 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4796
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004797- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4798 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4799 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4800 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4801
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004802- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4803 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004804 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4805 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4806 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004807
4808- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4809 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004810
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004811- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4812 bytes on its input.
4813
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004814Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004816
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004817- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004818 convenience function.
4819
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004820- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4821 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4822 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004823 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4824 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4825 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4826 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4827 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4828 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004829
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004830- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4831 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4832 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4833 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4834
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004835- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4836 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4837 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4838
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004839- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4840 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4841 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4842 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4843
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004844- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4845 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004847 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4848 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4849 new -l and -e options.
4850
4851- statcache is now deprecated.
4852
4853- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4854 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004856 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4857 time properly taken into account.
4858
4859- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4860 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4861 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4862 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4863
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004864Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004866
4867Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004870- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4871 is built with libdb3 if available.
4872
4873- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004875C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004877
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004878- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4879 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4880 PySequence_Size().
4881
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004882- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4883
4884- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4885 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4886 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4887
4888- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4889 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4890
4891- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4892 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004894New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004897- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4898 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4899
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004900- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4901 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4902
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004903- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004905Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004907
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004908- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4909 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004911Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004913
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004914Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004916
4917- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4918 removed completely in the next release.
4919
4920- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4921 OSX.
4922
4923- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4924 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4925
4926- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4927
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004928
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004929What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004930===========================
4931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4933
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004934Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004936
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004937- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004938 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004939 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004940 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4941 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004942 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4943 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004944 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4945 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004946
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004947- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4948 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4949
4950- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4951 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4952
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004955
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004956- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4957 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4958 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4959 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4960 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4961 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4962 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4963 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4964
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004965- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4966 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4967 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4968 example).
4969
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004970- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004971 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004972 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004973 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004974
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004975- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4976 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4977 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004978 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004979
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004980- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4981 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4982 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4983 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4984 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4985 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4986
4987 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4988
4989 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4990
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004991Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004993
4994- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4995
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004996- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4997
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004998- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4999 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005000
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005001- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5002 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5003 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5004 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5005 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5006 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005007 attributes.
5008
5009- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5010 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5011 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005012
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005013- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5014 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5015 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005016
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005017- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5018 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5019 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005020 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5021 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5022
5023- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5024 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005025
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005026Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005028
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005029- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5030 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5031
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005032- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5033 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5034 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5035 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5036
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005037- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5038 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5039 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5040 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5041
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005042 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5043 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5044 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5045 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5046 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5047 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5048 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5049 without losing information).
5050
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005051- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005052 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5053 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5054 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5055 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5056 module).
5057
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005058 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005059 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5060 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5061 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5062 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005063
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005064- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005065 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5066 encoding.
5067
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005068- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5069 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005072 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5073
5074- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5075 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5076 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5077 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5078
5079- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5080
5081- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5082 ON, and OFF.
5083
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005084- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5085 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5086
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005087Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005089
5090- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5091 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5092 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005093
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005094- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5095 been added: -X and -E.
5096
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005097Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005099
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005100- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5101 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5102
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005103C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005105
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005106- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5107 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5108 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5109 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5110 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5111
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005112- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5113 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5114 as long) arguments.
5115
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005116- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5117 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5118 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5119 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5120 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5121 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5122
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005123- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5124 input.
5125
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005126New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005128
5129Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005131
5132Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005134
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005135- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5136 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5137 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5138
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005139- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5140 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5141 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005142 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5145 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5146 import signal
5147 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005150 while 1:
5151 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005153 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5154 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5155 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5156 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005157
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005158
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005159What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5160===========================
5161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5163
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005164Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005166
5167- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5168 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5169 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5170
5171- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5172 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5173 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5174 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5175 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5176 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5177 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005178
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005179- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005180 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005181 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5182 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5183 associate a docstring with a property.
5184
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005185- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5186 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5187 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5188 other built-in object types.
5189
5190- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5191 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5192 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5193 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5194 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5195
5196- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5197 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5198
5199- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5200 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005201 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005202 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5203 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5204 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5205 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5206 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5207
5208- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5209 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5210 class.
5211
5212- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5213 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5214 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5215 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5216
5217- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5218 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5219 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5220 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5221
5222- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5223 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5224
5225- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5226 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5227 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5228 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5229 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005230 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005231 with the same value as s.
5232
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005233- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5234
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005235Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005236----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005237
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005238- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5239
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005240- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5241 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5242 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5243 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5244 objects.
5245
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005246- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5247 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005248 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5249 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5250
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005251- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5252 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5253 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5254
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005255Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005257
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005258- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5259 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5260 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5261 by the instances.
5262
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005263- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5264 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5265 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5266
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005267- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5268 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5269 before the entire comparison is complete.
5270
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005271- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5272 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5273 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5274
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005275- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5276 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5277 getwriter().
5278
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005279- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5280 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5281
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005282- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005283 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5284 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5285
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005286- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5287 iterable object.
5288
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005289- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5290 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005291
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005292- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5293 authentication.
5294
5295- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5296 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005297
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005298- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005299 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5300 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5301 a sample driver.)
5302
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005303Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005305
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005306- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5307 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5308 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5309 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5310 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5311 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5312 kernel has large file support.
5313
5314- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5315 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5316 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5317 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5318 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5319
5320- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5321 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5322 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5323
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005327- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5328 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5329
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005330New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005333- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5334 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5335
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005336Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005338
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005339- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5340 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5341 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5342 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5343 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5344
5345- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5346 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5347 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5348 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5349
5350- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5351 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5352
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005353Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005356- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005357 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5358 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005360
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005361What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5362===========================
5363
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005364*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5365
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005366Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005368
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005369- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5370 big to represent as a C double.
5371
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005372- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5373 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5374 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5375 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5376 restriction).
5377
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005378- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5379 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5380 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5381 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5382 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5383
5384 >>> dir([])
5385 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5386 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5387 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5388 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5389 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5390 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5391 'reverse', 'sort']
5392
5393 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005395- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005396 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5397 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5398 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5399 OverflowError exception.
5400
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005401- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005402 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005403 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5404 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5405 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5406 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5407 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005408 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5410 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5411
5412 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5413 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5414 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5415 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005416
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005417- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005418 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5419 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5420 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5421 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5422 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5423 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5424 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5425 once it is created.
5426
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005427- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5428 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5429 (key, value) pairs.
5430
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005431- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005432 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5433 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5434
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005435- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5436 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5437 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5438 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5439 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005440
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005441- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005442 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5443 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5444
5445 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5446
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005447- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005448 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5449
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005450Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005452
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005453- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005454 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5455 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005456
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005457- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5458 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5459 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5460 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5461 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5462 in this area anymore).
5463
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005464- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5465 threading.Timer.
5466
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005467- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5468 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5469
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005470- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005471 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005473- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005474 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5475 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5476 converted to Python longs.
5477
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005478- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005479 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5480
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005481- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5482 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5483 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5484
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005485Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005487
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005488- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5489 division operators as per PEP 238.
5490
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005493
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005494- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5495 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5496 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5497 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5498
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005499C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005501
5502- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005503
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005504- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5505 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005506 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005507
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5509 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005510 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005513- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005514 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5515 module:
5516
5517 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005518
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005519 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5520 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005521
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005522 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5523 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005524
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005525 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5526
5527 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5528
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005529- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005530 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5531 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5532 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005533
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005535-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005536
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005537- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5538 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5539 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5540 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5541 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005542
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005544-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005545
5546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005547-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005548
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005549- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5550 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5551 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5552 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005553 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5554 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5555 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5556 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5557 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005558
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005559- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005560 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005563What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5564===========================
5565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5567
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005568Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005569-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005570
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005571- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5572 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5573
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005574- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5575 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5576 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005577
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005578- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5579 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5580 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5581 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005582
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005583- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005586
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005587Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005588-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005589
5590- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005591 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005592 the module docstring for details.
5593
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005594Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005595-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005596
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005597- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005598 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5599 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5600 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005601
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005602- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5603 Nick Mathewson.
5604
5605Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005606----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005607
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005608- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5609 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5610 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5611 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5612 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5613 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5614 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5615 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5616
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005617- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5618 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5619 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5620 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5621
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005622- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5623 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5624 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5625 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5626 come a long way).
5627
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005628- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5629 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5630 write filters for these warnings).
5631
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005632- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5633 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5634 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5635 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5636 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5637
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005638- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5639 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5640 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5641 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5642 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5643 older distribution.
5644
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005645Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005646-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005647
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005648- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5649 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005650 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005651
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005652- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5653 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5654 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5655
5656- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5657
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005658- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5659
5660- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5661
5662- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005665
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005666- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5667
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005668New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005669-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005670
5671C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005673
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005674- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5675 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5676 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5677 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5678 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5679 against buffer overruns.
5680
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005681- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005682 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5683 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005684 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5685 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5686 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5687
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005688- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5689 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5690 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5691 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5692 deprecated.
5693
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005694Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005695-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005696
5697- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5698 relevant is found.
5699
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005700
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005701What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005702===========================
5703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005704*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5705
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005706Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005708
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005709- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5710 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5711 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5712 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5713 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5714 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5715 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5716 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005717 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005718 repaired.
5719
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005720- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005721 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005722 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5723 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5724 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5725 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5726 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5727 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5728 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5729 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5730
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005731- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5732 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5733 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5734 leading BMO character).
5735
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005736- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5737 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5738 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5739
5740 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5741 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5742 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005743
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005744 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5745 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5746 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5747 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5748 for various simple to use conversions.
5749
5750 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5751 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5752
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005753 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5754 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5755 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5756 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5757 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5758 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5759 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5760 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5761 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5762 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5763 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5764 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5765 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5766 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5767 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005768
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005769- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5770 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5771 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005772 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005773 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005774
5775 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005776 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5777 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5778 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5779 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5780 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005781 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5782 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005783
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005784 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5785 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5786 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005787 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005788
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005789- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5790 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5791 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5792 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5793 floating arithmetic,
5794
5795 x = 9007199254740992.0
5796 print long(x)
5797
5798 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5799 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5800 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5801 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5802 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5803 functions are of good quality).
5804
5805 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5806 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5807 algorithms to break.
5808
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005809- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5810 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5811 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5812 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5813 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5814 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5815 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5816 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5817 order.
5818
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005819- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5820 operation along the most common code paths.
5821
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005822- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5823 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5824
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005825- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5826 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5827 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5828 {}.update(UserDict())
5829
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005830- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5831 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5832 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5833 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5834 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5835 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5836 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5837 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5838
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005839- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005840 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005841
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005842 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005843 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5844 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005845 join() method of strings
5846 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005847 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5848 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005849 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005850 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005851
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005852- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5853 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5854
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005855- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5856 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5857
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005858- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5859 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5860 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5861 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5862
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005863- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5864 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005865 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005866 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5867 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005868
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005869- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5870
5871
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005873-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005874
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005875- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005876 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005877 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5878 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5879
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005880- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5881 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5882
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005883- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5884 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5885 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5886 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5887
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005888- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5889 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5890 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5891
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005892- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5893
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005894- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5895
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005896- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5897 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5898 that are still imported into string.py).
5899
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005900- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5901
5902- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5903 Now it does.
5904
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005905- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5906
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005907- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5908 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5909 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5910 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5911 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005912 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5913 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005914
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005915- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5916 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5917 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5918 'help(object)'.
5919
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005920Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005921-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005922
5923- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005924 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005925 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5926 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5927
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005928- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005929 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5930 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005931
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005932C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005933-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005934
5935- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5936 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005937
5938----
5939
5940**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**