blob: 293ba2fc1a52c5a9af58f7ba3302027d4d786454 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
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
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000015- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
16 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
17
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000018- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
19present).
20
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000021- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
22 codes.
23
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000024- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
25 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
26 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
27
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000028- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
29 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
30
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000031- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000032 (fixes bug #1119418).
33
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000034- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
35
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000036- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
37 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
38
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000039- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
40 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
41 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
42
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000043- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
44
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000045- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
46 reference counts in some error exit cases.
47
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000048- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
49 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
50 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
51 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
52 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
53 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
54 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
55 realloc.
56
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000057- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
58 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
59
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000060- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
61 like their int counterparts.
62
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000063- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
64 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
65 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
66 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
67 for a longer write-up of the problem).
68
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000069- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
70 serializing floats.
71
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000072- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
73 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
74 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
75
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000076- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
77 278.
78
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000079- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
80 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
81 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
82 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000083 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000084 PyNumber_*().
85 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
86
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000087- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
88 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
89 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
90 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
91
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000092- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
93 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
94 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
95 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
96 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
97
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000098- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
99 disabled caused a crash.
100
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000101- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
102 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
103
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000104- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000105 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
106
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000107- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
108
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000109- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000110 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
111 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
112 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000113
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000114- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
115
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000116- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
117 returning None.
118
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000119- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000120 ('\') with a specific error message.
121
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000122- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
123
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000124- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
125 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
126
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000127- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000128 an ferror() call.
129
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000130- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
131 list.sort().
132
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000133- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
134 (2+3) --> (5).
135
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000136- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
137
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000138- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
139 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000140
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000141- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
142 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
143 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
144
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000145- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
146 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
147 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
148
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149Extension Modules
150-----------------
151
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000152- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
153
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000154- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
155
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000156- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
157 the file system encoding.
158
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000159- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
160 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000161
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000162- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
163
164- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000165 line without newlines.
166
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000167- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
168 on Windows.
169
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000170- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
171 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
172
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000173- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
174 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
175 for large or negative values.
176
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000177- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000178 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000179
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000180- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
181
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000182- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
183 if available on the platform.
184
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000185- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
186 available on the platform.
187
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000188- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
189 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
190
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000191- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
192
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000193- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
194 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
195 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
196
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000197- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
198
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000199- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
200 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
201
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000202- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000203 file size.
204
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000205- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
206
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000207- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
208 {remove_history,replace_history}
209
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000210- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
211 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000212
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000213- stat_float_times is now True.
214
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000215- array.array objects are now picklable.
216
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000217- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
218 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
219
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000220- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
221 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
222 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
223
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000224- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
225 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000226
227Library
228-------
229
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000230- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
231 to get the correct encoding.
232
233- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
234 languages.
235
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000236- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
237
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000238- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
239
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000240- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
241
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000242- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
243 functionality.
244
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000245- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
246
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000247- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
248 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
249
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000250- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
251 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
252 match the Content-Length header.
253
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000254- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
255
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000256- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
257 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
258 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
259
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000260- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
261
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000262- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
263
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000264- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
265 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
266
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000267- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
268 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
269 Tkdnd.
270
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000271- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
272 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
273
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000274- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
275 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
276
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000277- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000278 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
279
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000280- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
281 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
282
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000283- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
284 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
285
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000286- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000287 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000288
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000289- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
290
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000291- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
292 error messages.
293
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000294- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
295
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000296- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
297 Bug #1224621.
298
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000299- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
300 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
301 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
302 terminates by raising StopIteration.
303
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000304- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
305
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000306- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
307 component of the path.
308
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000309- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
310 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
311 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
312 class at all.
313
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000314- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
315 files to PyPI.
316
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000317- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
318 them to PyPI.
319
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000320- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
321 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
322 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
323 work as expected.
324
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000325- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
326 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
327
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000328- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000329 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
330
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000331- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
332
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000333- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
334 to build.
335
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000336- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
337 symbolic links on Windows.
338
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000339- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000340 profile.py if available.
341
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000342- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
343
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000344- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
345 in LWPCookieJar.
346
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000347- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
348
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000349- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
350
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000351- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
352
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000353- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
354
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000355- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
356
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000357- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
358
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000359- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
360
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000361- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
362
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000363- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
364 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
365 be exploited in various ways.
366
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000367- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
368
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000369- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
370
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000371- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
372
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000373- Enhancements to the csv module:
374
375 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000376 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000377 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000378 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
379 reporting.
380 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
381 dictates.
382 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000383 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000384 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000385 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
386 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000387 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
388 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000389 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000390 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
391 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
392 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
393 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
394 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
395 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
396 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
397 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
398 without first creating a dialect class.
399 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
400 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
401 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000402 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000403 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
404 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000405 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
406 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
407 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
408 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000409 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
410 This has been fixed.
411
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000412- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
413 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
414 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
415 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
416
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000417- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
418
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000419- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
420 (Bug #951915).
421
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000422- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
423 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
424 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000425 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000426
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000427- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
428
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000429- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
430 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
431
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000432- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
433
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000434- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
435
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000436- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
437
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000438- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
439
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000440- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
441
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000442- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
443 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
444 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
445
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000446- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000447 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000448
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000449- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
450 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
451 tokenizer with very long source lines.
452
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000453- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
454 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
455
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000456- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
457 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000458
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000459- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
460 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
461
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000462- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
463 correctly.
464
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000465- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
466 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
467 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
468 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
469 between two lines.
470
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000471- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
472 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
473 handlers.
474
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000475- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000476 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
477 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000478
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000479- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
480 considering it exactly like a '*'.
481
482
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000483Build
484-----
485
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000486- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
487 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
488
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000489- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
490 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
491
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000492- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
493 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
494 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000495 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000496
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000497- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
498 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
499 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
500
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000501- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
502
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000503- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
504 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
505
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000506- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
507 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
508 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
509 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
510 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
511 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
512 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
513 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
514
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000515- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
516 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
517 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
518 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
519
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000520
521C API
522-----
523
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000524- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
525
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000526- Removed PyRange_New().
527
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000528
529Tests
530-----
531
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000532- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000533
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000534
535Documentation
536-------------
537
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000538- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
539
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000540- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
541
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000542- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
543
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000544- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
545
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000546- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
547
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000548- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
549
550- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
551
552- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
553
554- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
555
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000556- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
557 Closes bug #1166582.
558
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000559- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
560 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
561 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
562
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000563Mac
564---
565
566
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000567New platforms
568-------------
569
570- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
571
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000572
573Tools/Demos
574-----------
575
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000576- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
577 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
578 source files that need an encoding declaration.
579 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
580
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000581- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
582
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000583- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000584
585
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000586What's New in Python 2.4 final?
587===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000588
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000589*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000590
591Core and builtins
592-----------------
593
594- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
595 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
596 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
597
598
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000599What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
600==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000601
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000602*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000603
604Core and builtins
605-----------------
606
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000607- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
608 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
609 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
610
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000611
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000612Library
613-------
614
615- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
616 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
617 raised is re-raised.
618
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000619- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
620 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
621
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000622- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
623 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
624 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
625 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
626 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
627 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
628 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
629 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
630 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
631 by the slice are recomputed now.
632
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000633- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000634
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000635Build
636-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000637
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000638- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
639 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
640 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000641
642C API
643-----
644
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000645- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
646
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000647
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000648What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
649================================
650
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000651*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000652
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000653License
654-------
655
656The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
657is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
658changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
659Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
660intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
661durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
662the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
663License::
664
665 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
666
667says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
668to Python 2.1.1.
669
670The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
671License Version 2.
672
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000673Core and builtins
674-----------------
675
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000676- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
677 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
678 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
679 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
680 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
681 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
682 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
683 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
684 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
685 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
686
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000687- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000688
689Extension Modules
690-----------------
691
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000692- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
693 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
694 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
695 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000696
697Library
698-------
699
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000700- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
701 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
702 returned.
703
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000704- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
705
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000706- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
707 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
708
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000709- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
710
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000711- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
712 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000713
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000714- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
715
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000716- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
717
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000718- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000719 the source code is updated and reloaded.
720
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000721Build
722-----
723
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000724- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000725
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000726What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
727================================
728
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000729*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000730
731Core and builtins
732-----------------
733
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000734- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000735 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
736
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000737- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
738 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
739 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
740 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
741
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000742- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
743 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
744
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000745- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
746 constant.
747
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000748- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
749 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
750 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
751 large), and to anomalies such as
752 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
753 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
754 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
755 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000756
757Extension modules
758-----------------
759
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000760- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
761 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000762 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
763 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
764 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000765
766Library
767-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000768
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000769- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000770 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000771 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
772 --swig-cpp.
773
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000774- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
775 it is set.
776
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000777- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000778
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000779- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
780 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
781 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
782 Closes bug #1039270.
783
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000784- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000785
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000786 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000787 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
788 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
789 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
790 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
791 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
792 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
793 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
794 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
795 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
796 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
797 + Updates to documentation.
798
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000799- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
800 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
801 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
802 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
803
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000804- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000805
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000806- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
807 applications should use the getmember function.
808
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000809- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
810
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000811- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
812 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
813 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
814 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
815 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
816 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
817 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
818 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
819 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
820
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000821- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
822 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000823 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000824
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000825- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
826 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
827 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
828 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
829 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
830 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
831 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
832 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000833
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000834- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
835 the new public features (of which there are many).
836
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000837- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000838 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
839 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
840 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
841 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000842 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000843
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000844- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
845
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000846- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
847 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
848 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
849 options.
850
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000851- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
852 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
853 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
854 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
855 conditions under which non-string values work.
856
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000857Build
858-----
859
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000860- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
861 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
862 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
863
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000864- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
865 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
866 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
867 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
868 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000869
870C API
871-----
872
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000873- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
874 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
875
876- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
877
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000878- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
879 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
880 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
881 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
882 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
883 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
884 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
885 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
886 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
887
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000888- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
889
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000890- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
891 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
892 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000893
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000894Tests
895-----
896
897- test__locale ported to unittest
898
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000899Mac
900---
901
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000902- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
903 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
904 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000905
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000906Tools/Demos
907-----------
908
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000909- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
910 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
911 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
912 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
913 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000914
915
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000916What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
917=================================
918
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000919*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000920
921Core and builtins
922-----------------
923
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000924- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000925 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
926
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000927- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
928 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
929 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
930 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
931 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
932 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
933 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
934 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000935 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
936 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
937 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
938 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
939 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000940
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000941- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
942 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
943 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
944 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
945 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
946
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000947- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
948
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000949- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
950 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
951
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000952- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
953 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
954 modified the list.
955
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000956- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
957 functions is now writable.
958
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000959- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
960 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
961 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
962 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
963
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000964- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
965 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
966 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
967 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
968 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000969
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000970- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
971 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
972
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000973Extension modules
974-----------------
975
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000976- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
977
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000978- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
979 data.
980
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000981- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
982 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
983 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
984 supposed to have been truncated away.
985
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000986- Added socket.socketpair().
987
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000988- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
989 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
990
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000991- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000992 versions of Python, have now been removed.
993
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000994Library
995-------
996
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000997- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000998 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000999
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001000- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1001 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1002
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001003- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1004 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1005
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001006- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1007
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001008- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1009 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001010
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001011- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1012 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1013
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001014- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1015
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001016- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1017
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001018- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1019
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001020- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1021 Percivall.
1022
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001023- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1024 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1025
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001026- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1027 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1028 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001029 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001030
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001031- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1032 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1033 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1034 and exponent.
1035
1036- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1037
1038- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001039 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001040 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1041
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001042- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1043 to the readline module.
1044
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001045- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001046 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1047 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001048
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001049- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1050 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1051 contains symlinks.
1052
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001053- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1054 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1055
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001056- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1057 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1058 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1059
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001060- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1061 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1062 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1063 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1064 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1065 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1066 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1067 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1068 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1069 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1070 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1071 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1072 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1073
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001074- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1075
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001076Tools/Demos
1077-----------
1078
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001079- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1080 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1081
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001082- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1083
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001084Build
1085-----
1086
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001087- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1088 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1089 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1090 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1091 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1092 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1093 plans to do so.
1094
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001095- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1096 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1097
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001098- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1099 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1100
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001101- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1102 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1103
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001104- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1105 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1106
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001107- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1108 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1109
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001110C API
1111-----
1112
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001113..
1114
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001115Documentation
1116-------------
1117
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001118- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1119 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1120
1121- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1122 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1123 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001124
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001125New platforms
1126-------------
1127
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001128- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1129
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001130Tests
1131-----
1132
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001133..
1134
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001135Windows
1136-------
1137
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001138- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1139 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1140 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1141 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1142 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1143 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1144 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1145 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1146 the problem.
1147
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001148Mac
1149---
1150
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001151..
1152
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001153
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001154What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1155=================================
1156
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001157*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001158
1159Core and builtins
1160-----------------
1161
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001162- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1163 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1164 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1165 sensitive code.
1166
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001167- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001168 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001169
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001170 @staticmethod
1171 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001172
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001173 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001174
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001175- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1176 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1177 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1178 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1179 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1180 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1181 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1182 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1183 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1184 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1185 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1186
1187 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1188 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1189 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1190 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1191 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1192 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1193 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1194
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001195- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1196 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1197
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001198- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001199 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001200
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001201- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001202 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001203 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1204
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001205- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001206 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1207 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1208
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001209- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1210 types that support garbage collection.
1211
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001212- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1213
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001214- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1215 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1216 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1217 Jython.
1218
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001219- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1220
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001221- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1222 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1223
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001224- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1225 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1226 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001227
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001228- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1229 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1230 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1231
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001232Extension modules
1233-----------------
1234
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001235- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1236
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001237Library
1238-------
1239
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001240- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1241 TIS-620
1242
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001243- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1244 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1245 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1246 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1247 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1248 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1249 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1250 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1251 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1252 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1253
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001254- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1255
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001256- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1257 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1258 same as when the argument is omitted).
1259 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1260
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001261- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1262
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001263- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1264 schemes are offered.
1265
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001266- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1267
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001268- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1269 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1270 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1271
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001272- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1273
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001274- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1275 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1276
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001277- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1278 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1279 when dummy_threading is being used.
1280
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001281- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1282 from a tarfile.
1283
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001284- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001285 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001286
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001287- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1288 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1289 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1290 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1291
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001292- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1293 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1294
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001295- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1296 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1297 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1298 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1299 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1300 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1301 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1302 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1303 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1304 by some other method in progress).
1305
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001306- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1307 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1308 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001309
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001310- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1311
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001312- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1313 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1314 AM Kuchling.
1315
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001316- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1317 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1318 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1319
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001320- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1321 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1322 instead of unsigned.
1323
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001324- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001325 no longer part of the public API.
1326
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001327- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1328 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1329 string methods of the same name).
1330
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001331- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001332 SF patch 945642.
1333
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001334- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1335
1336 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1337
1338 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1339 DocTestSuites.
1340
1341- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1342 that provide thread-local data.
1343
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001344- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1345 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1346
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001347- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1348
1349- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1350 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1351 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1352
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001353- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1354
1355 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1356 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1357 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001358
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001359 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1360 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1361 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1362 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1363
1364 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1365 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1366
1367 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1368 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1369 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1370 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1371
1372 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1373 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1374 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1375 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1376 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1377
1378 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1379 wrapping help output.
1380
1381 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1382 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1383 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001384
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001385C API
1386-----
1387
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001388- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1389 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1390 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1391 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1392 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1393 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1394 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1395 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1396 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1397 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1398 its visible semantics have not changed.
1399
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001400- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1401 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1402
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001403Documentation
1404-------------
1405
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001406- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001407
1408 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001409 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001410
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001411 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001412
1413 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1414
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001415- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001416
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001417Tests
1418-----
1419
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001420- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001421 platforms that use the Makefile.
1422
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001423- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1424 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1425 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1426
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001428What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1429=================================
1430
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001431*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001432
1433Core and builtins
1434-----------------
1435
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001436- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1437 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1438 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1439 objects now (one object instead of three).
1440
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001441- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1442 Windows DLLs.
1443
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001444- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1445 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001446
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001447- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1448 a new .pyc magic.
1449
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001450- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1451 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1452 be there.
1453
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001454- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1455 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1456 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1457
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001458- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1459 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1460 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1461
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001462- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1463
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001464- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1465 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1466 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001467
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001468- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1469 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1470
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001471- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1472
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001473- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001474 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001475
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001476- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1477
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001478- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1479
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001480- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1481 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1482
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001483- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1484 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1485 Fixes bug #858016 .
1486
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001487- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1488 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1489 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1490
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001491- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1492 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1493 improves their performance (about 35%).
1494
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001495- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1496 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1497 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1498
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001499- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1500 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1501 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1502 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1503
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001504- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1505 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001506 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001507 length is not known).
1508
1509- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1510 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001511 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1512 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001513 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1514
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001515- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1516 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1517
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001518- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1519 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1520 keyword arguments.
1521
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001522- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1523 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1524 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1525
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001526- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1527 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1528 cases.
1529
1530- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1531 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1532 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1533 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1534 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1535 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1536 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1537 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1538 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1539 a release build.
1540
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001541- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1542 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1543
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001544- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001545 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001546
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001547- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1548 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1549 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1550 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1551 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1552 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1553 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1554 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1555 destroyed.
1556
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001557- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1558 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1559 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1560 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1561 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1562 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1563 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1564 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1565
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001566- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1567 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1568 character other than a space.
1569
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001570- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1571 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1572 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1573 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1574 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1575 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1576 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1577 attributes with the same name.
1578
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001579- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1580 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1581 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1582 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1583 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1584 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1585 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1586 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1587 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1588 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1589 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1590 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1591 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1592 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001593
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001594- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1595 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1596 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1597 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1598 This has been repaired.
1599
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001600- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1601
1602- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1603
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001604- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1605 over a sequence.
1606
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001607- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001608 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001609
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001610- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1611
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001612- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1613 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1614 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1615 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1616 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1617 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1618 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1619 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1620
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001621- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1622 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1623 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1624
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001625- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1626 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1627 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1628 freelist.
1629
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001630- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1631 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1632
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001633- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1634 number.
1635
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001636- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1637 a TypeError exception.
1638
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001639- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1640 820195.
1641
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001642- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1643 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1644 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1645
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001646- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001647 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1648 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001649
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001650- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1651 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1652 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1653
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001654- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1655 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001656 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001657
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001658- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001659 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1660 the first call.
1661
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001662
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001663Extension modules
1664-----------------
1665
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001666- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1667 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1668
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001669- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1670 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1671 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1672 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1673 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1674 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1675 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001676
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001677- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1678
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001679- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1680
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001681- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1682 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1683
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001684- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1685 fewer false positives.
1686
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001687- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1688 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1689
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001690- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001691 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1692
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001693- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001694 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001695 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001696 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1697 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001698
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001699- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1700 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1701 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1702 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1703
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001704- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1705 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1706 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1707 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1708 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1709 #897625.
1710
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001711- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1712 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1713
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001714- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1715 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1716 and pops on either side of the deque.
1717
1718- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1719 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1720
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001721- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1722 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1723 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1724 other functions that expect a function argument.
1725
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001726- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1727
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001728- os.getsid was added.
1729
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001730- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1731 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1732 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1733
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001734- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1735
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001736- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1737
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001738- readline.clear_history was added.
1739
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001740- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1741
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001742- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1743
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001744- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1745
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001746- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1747
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001748- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1749
1750- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1751
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001752- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1753
1754- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1755
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001756- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1757 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1758 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1759
1760- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1761 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1762 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1763 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1764 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1765 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1766 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1767
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001768- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1769 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1770 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1771 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001772
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001773- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001774 iterators from a single iterable.
1775
1776- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1777 of raising a TypeError exception.
1778
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001779- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1780 as parameter.
1781
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001782Library
1783-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001784
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001785- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1786
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001787- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1788 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1789 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001790
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001791- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1792 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1793 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001794
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001795- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001796
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001797- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1798 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001799
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001800- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1801 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1802
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001803- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1804
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001805- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001806 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001807
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001808- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001809 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001810
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001811- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1812
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001813- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1814 on cygwin and mingw32.
1815
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001816- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1817
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001818- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1819 module.
1820
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001821- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1822 installation scheme for all platforms.
1823
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001824- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001825 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001826
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001827- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1828 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1829 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1830
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001831- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1832 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1833 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1834
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001835- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1836
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001837- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1838
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001839- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1840 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1841
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001842- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1843 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1844 type pattern with the same value exists.
1845
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001846- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1847 when run from the command prompt).
1848
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001849- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1850 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1851
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001852- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1853 default sort).
1854
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001855- Added global runctx function to profile module
1856
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001857- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1858
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001859- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1860
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001861- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1862
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001863- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001864 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1865 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1866 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1867 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1868 accordingly.
1869
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001870- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1871 decoding standards.
1872
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001873- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1874 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1875 called for all requests.
1876
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001877- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1878 they are passed to the compiler.
1879
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001880- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1881 indent, width and depth.
1882
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001883- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1884 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1885
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001886- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1887 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1888
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001889- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1890
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001891- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1892
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001893- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1894
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001895- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1896 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1897
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001898- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001899 for better performance.
1900
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001901- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001902
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001903- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1904 a string).
1905
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001906- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1907
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001908- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1909
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001910- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1911
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001912- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1913
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001914- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1915 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1916 list of fieldnames.
1917
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001918- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1919 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1920
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001921- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1922
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001923- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1924 empty lists.
1925
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001926- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1927 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1928 and shelves.
1929
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001930- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1931 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1932
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001933- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001934 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1935 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001936
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001937- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1938 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001939 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001940
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001941- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001942 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1943 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1944
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001945- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1946 and removed in Py2.4.
1947
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001948- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1949
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001950- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1951
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001952Tools/Demos
1953-----------
1954
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001955- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1956 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1957
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001958- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1959
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001960- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1961 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1962 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1963 destination in situations where both files are given.
1964
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001965- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1966 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1967 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1968 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1969
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001970- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1971
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001972- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1973 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1974 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1975 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1976 now.
1977
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001978- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1979 in effect
1980
1981- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1982 C-c C-h
1983
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001984- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1985 -d option was given.
1986
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001987Build
1988-----
1989
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001990- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1991 build under OS X.
1992
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001993- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1994 --enable-profiling.
1995
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001996- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1997 is configured --with-tsc.
1998
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001999- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2000 on AMD64.
2001
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002002- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2003 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2004
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002005- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2006 removed.
2007
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002008- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2009 supported (see PEP 11).
2010
2011- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2012
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002013- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2014
2015- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2016 (see PEP 11).
2017
2018- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2019 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2020
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002021C API
2022-----
2023
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002024- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2025 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2026 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2027
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002028- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2029 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2030 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2031 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2032
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002033- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2034 generator objects.
2035
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002036- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2037 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002038 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2039 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002040
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002041- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2042 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2043
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002044- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2045 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2046 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2047 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2048 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2049
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002050- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2051 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2052 about 10% faster.
2053
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002054- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2055 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2056
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002057- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2058 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2059 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2060 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2061
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002062Windows
2063-------
2064
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002065- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2066 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2067 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2068 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2069
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002070- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2071 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2072 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2073
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002074
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002075What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2076===============================
2077
2078*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2079
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002080IDLE
2081----
2082
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002083- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2084 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2085 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2086 context-menu actions.
2087
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002088- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2089 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2090 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2091 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2092 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2093 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2094 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2095 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2096 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2097
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002098
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002099What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2100=============================================
2101
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002102*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002103
2104Core and builtins
2105-----------------
2106
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002107- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002108 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002109 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2110
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002111Extension modules
2112-----------------
2113
2114- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2115 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2116 than once. This has been fixed.
2117
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002118- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2119 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2120 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2121 call.
2122
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002123- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2124
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002125Library
2126-------
2127
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002128- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2129 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2130
2131- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2132 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2133 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2134 restored.
2135
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002136IDLE
2137----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002138
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002139- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002140
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002141Build
2142-----
2143
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002144- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2145 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2146
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002147C API
2148-----
2149
2150Windows
2151-------
2152
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002153- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2154 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2155
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002156- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2157
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002158Mac
2159---
2160
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002161- Various fixes to pimp.
2162
2163- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2164
2165- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2166 more problems than it solves.
2167
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002168
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002169What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2170=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002171
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002172*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2173
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002174Core and builtins
2175-----------------
2176
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002177- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2178 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2179
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002180- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2181 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002182 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002183
2184- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2185 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2186 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002187 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002188
2189- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2190 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002191
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002192- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2193 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2194 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2195
2196- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002197 770247.
2198
2199- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002200
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002201Extension modules
2202-----------------
2203
2204- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2205 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2206
2207- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2208
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002209- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2210
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002211- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2212 contained within the _strptime module.
2213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002214- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2215 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2216
2217- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002218 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2219
2220- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2221 the find_class attribute, if present.
2222
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002223- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002224
2225 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2226 (SF bug 763298).
2227
2228 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002229 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2230 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2231 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002232
2233 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2234
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002235Library
2236-------
2237
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002238- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2239
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002240- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2241 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2242 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2243 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2244 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2245 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2246 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2247 or Tester().
2248
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002249- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2250 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2251 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2252 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2253 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2254 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2255 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2256 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2257 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002258
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002259 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002260
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002261- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2262 weren't before was an oversight.
2263
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002264- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2265 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2266
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002267- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2268 when there are no lines.
2269
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002270- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2271 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2272
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002273- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2274 to child processes.
2275
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002276- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2277
2278- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2279
2280- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2281 xmlrpclib.
2282
2283- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2284 responses.
2285
2286- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2287 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2288
2289- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2290 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2291 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2292
2293- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2294 used as patterns.
2295
2296- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2297 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2298 than Tk 8.3.
2299
2300- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2301
2302- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002303
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002304Tools/Demos
2305-----------
2306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2308
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002309- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2310
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002311- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002312
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002313Build
2314-----
2315
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002316- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2317
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002318- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2319
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002320- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2321 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002322
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002323- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2324 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2325 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002326
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002327C API
2328-----
2329
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002330- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2331 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2332
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002333Windows
2334-------
2335
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002336- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2337 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2338 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2339 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2340 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2341 Python exception ::
2342
2343 thread.error: can't start new thread
2344
2345 is raised now.
2346
2347- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2348 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2349 instead of from DLL teardown.
2350
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002351Mac
2352---
2353
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002354- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002355 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002356 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2357 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2358 the executable in the bundle.
2359
2360- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002361
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002362- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2363
2364- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2365 on Panther.
2366
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002367What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2368================================
2369
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002370*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002371
2372Core and builtins
2373-----------------
2374
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002375- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2376 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2377 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2378 with the -i option.
2379
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002380- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2381 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2382
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002383- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2384 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2385
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002386- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2387 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2388 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2389 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2390 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2391 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2392 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2393 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2394 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2395 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2396 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2397 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2398 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002399
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002400- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2401 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2402 embedded in a lambda expression.
2403
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002404- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2405 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2406 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2407 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2408 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2409
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002410- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2411 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2412 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2413
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002414- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2415 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2416
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002417- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2418 It's writable again.
2419
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002420- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2421 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2422 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002423 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002424
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002425- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2426 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2427 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2428
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002429Extension modules
2430-----------------
2431
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002432- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2433 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2434
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002435- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2436 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2437 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2438 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2439
2440- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2441 collection.
2442
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002443- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2444 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2445 unique within a single program run.
2446
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002447- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2448 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2449
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002450- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2451 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2452
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002453- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2454 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002455
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002456- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2457
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002458- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2459 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2460
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002461- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2462 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2463 for many BSD-derived systems.
2464
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002465
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002466Library
2467-------
2468
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002469- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2470 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2471 primary ones:
2472
2473 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2474 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2475 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2476
2477 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2478 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2479 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2480 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2481 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2482 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2483
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002484- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2485 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2486 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2487 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2488 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2489 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2490 argument.
2491
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002492- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2493 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2494 in the archive.
2495
2496- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2497 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2498
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002499- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2500 569574).
2501
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002502- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2503 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2504 no more.
2505
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002506- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2507 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2508 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2509 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2510 code coverage.
2511
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002512- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2513 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2514 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002515 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2516 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002517
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002518- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2519 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2520 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002521 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002522
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002523- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2524
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002525- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2526 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2527 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2528 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2529
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002530- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2531 handling.
2532
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002533- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2534 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2535
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002536- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2537 in socket.py.
2538
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002539- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2540
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002541- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2542 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2543 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2544 opener with proxy support.
2545
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002546- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2547
2548- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2549
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002550Tools/Demos
2551-----------
2552
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002553- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2554
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002555- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2556
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002557- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2558 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002559
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002560- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2561 files.
2562
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002563Build
2564-----
2565
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002566- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002567 different root directory.
2568
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002569C API
2570-----
2571
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002572- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2573 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2574 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2575 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2576 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2577 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2578 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2579 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2580 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2581 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2582
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002583- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2584 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2585 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2586 from Python.
2587
2588
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002589New platforms
2590-------------
2591
2592None this time.
2593
2594Tests
2595-----
2596
2597- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2598 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2599
2600Windows
2601-------
2602
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002603- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2604
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002605- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2606 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2607 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2608 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2609 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2610 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2611 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2612 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2613 that's what it's for.
2614
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002615Mac
2616---
2617
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002618- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2619 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2620 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2621 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002622- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2623 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2624- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002625
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002626SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2627------------------------------------
2628
2629430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2630598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2631622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2632661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2633683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2634697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2635713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2636724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2637727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2638729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2639730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2640731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2641732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2642733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2643735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2644740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2645744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2646745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2647747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2648749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2649751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2650753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2651755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2652757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2653760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2654
2655
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002656What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2657================================
2658
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002659*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002660
2661Core and builtins
2662-----------------
2663
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002664- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2665 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2666
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002667- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2668 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2669 and cannot be strings).
2670
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002671- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2672 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2673 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2674 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2675
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002676- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2677 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2678 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2679 Python itself.
2680
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002681- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2682 the referenced object, if it has one.
2683
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002684- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2685 the thread started at
2686 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2687
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002688- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2689 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2690 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2691 placed on a list index.
2692
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002693- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2694 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2695 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2696 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2697
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002698- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2699 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2700 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2701 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2702 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2703 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2704 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2705
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002706- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2707 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2708 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2709 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2710 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2711
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002712- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2713 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002714
2715- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2716 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2717 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2718 #693195.)
2719
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002720- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2721 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002722
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002723- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002724 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002725 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2726 interpreter executions, would fail.
2727
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002728- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002729 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002730 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002731
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002732Extension modules
2733-----------------
2734
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002735- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2736 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2737 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2738 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2739
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002740- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2741 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2742
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002743- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2744 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2745 and Greg Chapman.)
2746
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002747- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2748 recursively.
2749
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002750- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002751 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2752 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2753 leaks.
2754
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002755- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2756
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002757- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2758 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2759 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2760 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2761 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2762 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2763 #705836.
2764
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002765- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002766 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2767
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002768- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2769 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2770 See SF bug #692416.
2771
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002772- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2773 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2774
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002775- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2776 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2777 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002778
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002779- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002780 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2781 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2782
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002783- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2784 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2785 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2786 timeouts to work properly.
2787
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002788Library
2789-------
2790
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002791- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2792 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2793 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2794 future release.
2795
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002796- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2797 for querying platform dependent features.
2798
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002799- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002800
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002801- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2802 pickle protocol versions.
2803
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002804- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2805 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2806 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2807
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002808- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2809
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002810- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2811 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2812 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2813 modules.
2814
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002815- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2816 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2817 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2818
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002819- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2820 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2821
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002822- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2823 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2824 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2825
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002826- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002827 MS Office extensions.
2828
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002829- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2830 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2831
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002832- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2833 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2834
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002835- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2836 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2837 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2838 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2839 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2840 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2841
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002842- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2843 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2844 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002845
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002846- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2847 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2848 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2849
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002850- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2851
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002852- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2853 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2854 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2855
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002856Tools/Demos
2857-----------
2858
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002859- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2860 See the module docstring for details.
2861
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002862Build
2863-----
2864
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002865- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2866 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002867
2868C API
2869-----
2870
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002871- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2872
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002873- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2874 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2875 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2876
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002877- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2878 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002879
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002880 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2881 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2882 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002883
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002884- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002885 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2886
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002887- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2888 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2889 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002890
2891New platforms
2892-------------
2893
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002894None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002895
2896Tests
2897-----
2898
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002899- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2900 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002901
2902Windows
2903-------
2904
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002905- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2906 function.
2907
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002908- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2909 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002910
2911Mac
2912---
2913
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002914- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2915 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002916
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002917- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2918 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002919
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002920- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2921 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2922 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002923
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002924- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002925 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2926 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002927
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002928- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2929 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002930
2931
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002932What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2933=================================
2934
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002935*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002936
2937Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002938-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002939
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002940- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2941 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2942 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2943
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002944- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2945 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2946 (SF patch #664376.)
2947
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002948- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2949 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2950 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2951 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2952 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2953 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002954 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002955
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002956- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2957 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2958 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2959 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002960 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002961
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002962- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2963 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2964 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2965 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2966 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2967 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2968 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2969 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2970 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2971 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2972 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2973
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002974- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2975 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2976 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2977 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2978 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2979 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2980
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002981- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2982 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2983
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002984- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2985 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2986 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2987 case.)
2988
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002989- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2990 passed as unicode strings.
2991
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002992- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2993 See SF bug #683467.
2994
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002995- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2996 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2997
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002998- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2999
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003000- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3001
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003002- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3003 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3004 arguments.
3005
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003006- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3007 See SF bug #667147.
3008
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003009- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003010 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003011 See SF bug #676155.
3012
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003013- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003014 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003015 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3016 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3017 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3018 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3019 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3020 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003021
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003022Extension modules
3023-----------------
3024
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003025- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3026 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3027 tp_as_number pointer.
3028
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003029- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3030 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3031 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3032 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3033 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3034
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003035- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3036
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003037- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3038
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003039- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003040 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003041 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3042 patch #678531.)
3043
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003044- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3045 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3046
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003047- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3048 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3049
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003050- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3051
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003052- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3053 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3054 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3055
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003056- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3057
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003058- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3059 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3060
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003061- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003062
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003063- datetime changes:
3064
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003065 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3066
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003067 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3068 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3069 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3070 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3071 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3072 now.
3073
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003074 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003075 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3076 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003077
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003078 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003079 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003080 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3081 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3082 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3083 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003084
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003085 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3086 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3087 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003088 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3089
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003090 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3091 by a later example coded by Guido.
3092
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003093 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003094 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3095 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3096 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003097 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3098 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3099
3100 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3101 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3102 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3103 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3104 tzinfo subclass instance.
3105
3106 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3107 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3108 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3109 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3110 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3111 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3112 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3113 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003114
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003115 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3116 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3117 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3118 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3119 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003120 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3121
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003122 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003123
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003124 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3125 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3126 as a naive datetime object.
3127
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003128 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3129 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3130 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3131
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003132 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3133 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3134 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3135 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3136 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3137 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3138 comparison.
3139
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003140 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3141 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3142 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3143 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003144 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003145
3146 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003147
3148 and ::
3149
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003150 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3151
3152 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3153 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3154 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3155 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3156
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003157 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3158 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3159 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3160 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3161 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3162
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003163 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3164 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003165 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3166 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003167
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003168Library
3169-------
3170
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003171- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3172 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3173
3174- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3175 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3176 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3177 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3178 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3179 See PEP 307 for details.
3180
3181- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3182 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3183
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003184- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3185 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003186 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003187 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3188 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003189 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003190
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003191- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3192 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3193
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003194- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3195 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3196 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3197
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003198- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3199
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003200- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3201 exception.
3202
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003203- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3204 class.
3205
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003206- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3207 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3208 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3209
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003210- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3211 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3212
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003213- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003214 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3215 See SF bug #659228.
3216
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003217- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3218 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3219 See SF patch #651082.
3220
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003221- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003222
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003223- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3224 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3225
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003226- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003227 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003228
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003229- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3230 DOS paths from other platforms.
3231
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003232Tools/Demos
3233-----------
3234
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003235- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3236 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3237 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3238 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3239 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3240 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3241 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3242 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3243 example:
3244
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003245 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3246 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003247
3248 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3249
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003250
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003251Build
3252-----
3253
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003254- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3255 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3256 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003257 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3258
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003259 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3260
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003261- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3262 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3263 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3264 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3265 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3266 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3267 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3268 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3269 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3270
3271- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3272 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3273 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3274 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3275
3276- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3277 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3278
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003279C API
3280-----
3281
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003282- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3283 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003284
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003285- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3286 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3287 tp_as_number pointer.
3288
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003289- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3290 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3291 (SF #681367)
3292
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003293- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3294 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3295 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3296 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003298Tests
3299-----
3300
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003301- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003302 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3303 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3304 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3305 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3306 pydoc.)
3307
3308- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3309
3310- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003311
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003312Windows
3313-------
3314
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003315- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3316 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3317 time).
3318
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003319- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3320 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3321
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003322- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3323 release without strong cryptography.
3324
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003325- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003326 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003327
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003328- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3329 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003331Mac
3332---
3333
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003334- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3335 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003336
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003337- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3338 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3339 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003340
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003341- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3342 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003343
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003344- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3345 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3346 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3347 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003348
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003349- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003350 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3351 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3352 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003353
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003354
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003355What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003356=================================
3357
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003358*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003360Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003362
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003363- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3364
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003365- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3366 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003367 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003368 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003369 a different meaning than before.
3370
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003371- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003372 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003373 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003374
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003375- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003376 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003377 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003378
3379- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3380 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3381 and deallocation.
3382
3383- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3384 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3385
3386- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3387 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3388 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3389 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3390 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3391
3392- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3393 now detected by the garbage collector.
3394
3395- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3396 [SF bug 519621]
3397
3398- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3399 identifier.
3400
3401- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3402 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3403 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3404 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3405 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3406 [SF bug 563060]
3407
3408- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3409 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3410 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3411 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3412 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3413
3414- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3415 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3416 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3417
3418- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3419
3420- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3421 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3422 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3423 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3424 state of the slots would be lost.)
3425
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003426Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003428
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003429- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003430 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3431 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3432 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3433 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003434 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3435 Jython 2.1.
3436
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003437- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003438 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003439 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3440 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3441 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3442 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3443 these, see PEP 302.
3444
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003445- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3446 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3447 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3448
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003449- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3450 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3451 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3452
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003453- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3454 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3455 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3456
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003457- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3458 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3459 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3460 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3461 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3462 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3463 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3464 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3465 releases or implementations.
3466
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003467- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003468 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3469 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003470
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003471- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3472 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3473
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003474- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3475 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3476 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3477
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003478- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3479 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3480
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003481- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3482 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003483 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3484 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003485
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003486- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3487 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3488 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3489 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3490 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3491
3492 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3493 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3494 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3495 pattern.
3496
3497 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3498 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3499 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3500 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3501
3502 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3503 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3504 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3505 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3506 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3507 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3508
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003509- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3510 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3511 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3512 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3513 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3514 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3515 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3516 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003517
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003518- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3519 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3520 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3521 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3522 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003523 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3524 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3525 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3526 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3527 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3528 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3529 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003530
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003531- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3532 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3533
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003534- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3535 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3536 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3537 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3538 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3539 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3540 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3541 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3542 to Zack Weinberg!
3543
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003544- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3545 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3546 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3547 type. This has been fixed now.
3548
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003549- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3550 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3551 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3552
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003553- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3554 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3555 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3556 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3557 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3558 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3559 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3560 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003561 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003562
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003563- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3564 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3565 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003566
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003567- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3568 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3569 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3570 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3571 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3572 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3573 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3574 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003575 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003576 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3577 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3578
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003579- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3580 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3581 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3582 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3583 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3584 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3585 this.)
3586
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003587- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3588 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003589 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003590 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003591 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3592 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003593 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3594 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003595
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003596- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3597 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3598 currently running.
3599
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003600- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3601 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3602 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3603 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3604
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003605- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3606 as directory names.
3607
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003608- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3609 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3610
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003611- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3612 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3613
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003614- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003615 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3616 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003617
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003618- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3619 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3620 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3621 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3622 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3623
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003624- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3625 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3626 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3627 removed.
3628
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003629- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3630 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3631 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3632
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003633- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3634 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3635 to __debug__.
3636
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003637- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3638 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3639 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3640
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003641- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3642 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3643 deprecated now.
3644
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003645- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3646 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3647 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003648
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003649- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3650 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3651 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3652 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3653 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003654
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003655- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3656 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3657
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003658- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3659 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3660 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003661 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003662 is backward compatible.
3663
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003664- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3665 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3666 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3667 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3668 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3669
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003670- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3671 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3672 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3673 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3674 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3675 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003676
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003677- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3678 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3679
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003680- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3681 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3682
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003683- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3684 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3685 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3686 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3687 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3688
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003689- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3690 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3691 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3692
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003693- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003694 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3695
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003696- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3697 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3698 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003699
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003700- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3701 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3702
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003703- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3704 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3705 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3706
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003707- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3708
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003709Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003711
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003712- Added three operators to the operator module:
3713 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3714 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3715 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3716
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003717- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3718
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003719- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3720 archives.
3721
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003722- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3723 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3724 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3725
3726 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3727
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003728- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3729 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3730 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003731 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003732
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003733- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3734 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3735 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3736 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003737 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3738 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3739 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3740 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003741
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003742- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3743 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003744
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003745- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3746
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003747- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3748 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3749
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003750- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3751 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3752 supported.
3753
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003754- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3755
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003756- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3757 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003758
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003759- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3760 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3761
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003762- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3763
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003764- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3765 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3766
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003767- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3768 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3769 functions but callable type objects.
3770
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003771- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003772 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003773 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003774
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003775- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3776 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003777
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003778- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3779 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003780
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003781- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3782 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3783 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3784 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3785
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003786- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3787 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003788
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003789- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3790 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3791 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3792 and __imul__.
3793
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003794- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003795 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3796 is called.
3797
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003798- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3799 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3800 interpreter was compiled.
3801
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003802- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3803 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3804 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003805 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003806 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3807 1, not 2.
3808
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003809- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3810 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3811 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3812 limit.
3813
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003814- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3815 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3816 bug #623464.
3817
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003818- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3819 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3820 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3821 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3822
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003823Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003825
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003826- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3827
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003828- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3829 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3830 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3831 with Python 2.3a2.
3832
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003833- os.path exposes getctime.
3834
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003835- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003836 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003837 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003838 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003839 unit tests of floating point results.
3840
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003841- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3842 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3843 has been increased.
3844
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003845- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3846 executed.
3847
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003848- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3849 postinstallation script.
3850
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003851- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3852 test the current module.
3853
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003854- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003855 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3856 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3857 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3858 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3859
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003860- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003861 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003862 Ward's Optik package.
3863
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003864- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3865 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3866 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3867 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3868
3869- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3870 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003871 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003872
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003873- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3874 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3875 shelf are binary pickles.
3876
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003877- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3878 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3879
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003880- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3881 modules are iterators now.
3882
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003883- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3884 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3885 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3886 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3887 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3888 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003889
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003890- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3891 with their entity value.
3892
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003893- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3894
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003895- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3896 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003897
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003898- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3899 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003900 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003901
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003902- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3903 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3904 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3905 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3906 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3907 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3908 main():
3909
3910 import locale
3911 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3912
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003913- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3914 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3915
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003916- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3917 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3918 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3919 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3920 to the new standard.
3921
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003922- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3923 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3924 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3925 an extension to the database.
3926
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003927- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3928 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3929 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3930 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003931 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003932
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003933- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003934 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003935
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003936- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3937 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3938 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3939 bounded integers.
3940
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003941- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3942 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3943 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3944 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3945 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3946 in existence.
3947
3948 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3949 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3950 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3951 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3952 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3953 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3954
3955 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3956 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3957 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3958 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3959
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003960- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3961 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3962 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3963
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003964- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3965
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003966- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3967 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3968 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3969 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3970
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003971- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3972 argument.
3973
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003974- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3975 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3976 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3977 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3978 [SF patch 560794].
3979
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003980- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3981 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3982 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003983 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3984 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3985 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003986
3987- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3988 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003989
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003990- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3991 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3992 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3993 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003994
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003995- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3996 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3997 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3998 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3999 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4000
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004001- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004002
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004003- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4004
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004005- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4006 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4007 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4008 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4009 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4010 identical to None.
4011
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004012- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4013 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4014 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4015 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4016 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4017 results now.
4018
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004019- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4020 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4021
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004022- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4023 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4024 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4025 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4026 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4027 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4028 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4029 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4030
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004031- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4032
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004033- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4034 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4035
4036- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4037 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4038 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4039 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4040 and other systems.
4041
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004042- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4043 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4044 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4045 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 +00004046 work well with these.
4047
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004048- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4049
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004050- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004051 connections.
4052
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004053- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4054 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4055 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4056
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004057- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4058 sets
4059
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004060- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4061 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4062 name.
4063
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004064- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4065 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4066 passed in.
4067
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004068- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004069 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004070 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4071 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004072
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004073- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4074
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004075- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4076
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004077- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4078 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4079 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4080
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004081- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4082 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4083 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4084 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004085 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004086
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004087- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004088 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004089 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004090
4091- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4092 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4093 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4094
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004095- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004096 the value of its expression argument.
4097
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004098- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4099 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4100 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4101
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004102- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4103 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4104 skipstone browser was included.
4105
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004106- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4107 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4108
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004109Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004111
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004112- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4113 names in addition to accepting file names.
4114
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004115- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4116 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4117 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4118 still used and useful.)
4119
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004120- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4121 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4122 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4123 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004124
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004125- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4126 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4127 the generated binary.
4128
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004129Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004131
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004132- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4133
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004134- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4135 except in the hands of experts.
4136
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004137- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004138 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4139 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4140 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004141
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004142- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4143 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4144 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4145 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4146 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4147 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4148 builds.
4149
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004150- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4151 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4152 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4153 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4154 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4155 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4156 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4157 new type.
4158
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004159- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004160
4161 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4162 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4163 positive infinities.
4164
4165 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4166 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4167 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4168 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4169 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4170 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4171 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4172
4173 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4174
4175 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4176
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004177- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4178 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4179 size of the executable.
4180
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004181- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4182 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4183 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4184 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004185
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004186- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4187
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004188- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4189 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4190 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004191
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004192- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4193 well as Unix.
4194
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004195- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4196 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4197 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4198 modules in the README file for details.
4199
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004202
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004203- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4204 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004205 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004206 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004207 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004208
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004209- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4210 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4211 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4212 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4213 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4214 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004215 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004216 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4217 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4218 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4219 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4220 aligned.)
4221
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004222- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4223 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4224 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4225
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004226- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4227 level.
4228
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004229- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4230 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4231 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4232 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4233 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4234
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004235- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4236 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4237 code.
4238
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004239- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4240 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4241 adjusting for negative indices.
4242
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004243- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4244 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4245 object.
4246
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004247- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4248 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4249 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4250
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004251- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4252 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004253
4254- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4255
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004256- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4257 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4258 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4259 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4260
4261- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4262
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004263- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004264
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004265- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004266 without going through the buffer API.
4267
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004269
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004270- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4271 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4272 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4273 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4274
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004275- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4276 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4277
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004278- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004279 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004281New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004283
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004284- OpenVMS is now supported.
4285
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004286- AtheOS is now supported.
4287
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004288- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4289
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004290- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004292Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
4294
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004295- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4296 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4297 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298
4299Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004301
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004302- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4303 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4304 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4305 bugs.
4306 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004307 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004308 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4309 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004310 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004311
4312- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004313 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004314
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004315- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4316 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4317
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004318- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4319 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004320 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004321 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4322
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004323- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4324 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4325 use files" uninstall option).
4326
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004327- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4328
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004329- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4330 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4331
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004332- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4333 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4334 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4335
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004336- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4337 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4338 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4339 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4340 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004341 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4342 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4343 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004344
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004345- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004346 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004347 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4348 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4349 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4350 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4351 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4352 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4353 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4354 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4355 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4356 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4357 work around.
4358
4359- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4360 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4361 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4362 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4363 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4364 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4365 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4366 specified with O_CREAT too).
4367
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004368Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369----
4370
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004371- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004372
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004373- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4374 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4375 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4376
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004377- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4378 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4379 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4380
4381- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4382 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4383 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4384 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4385 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4386 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4387 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4388 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004389
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004390- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4391 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4392 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004393
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004394- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4395 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4396 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4397 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4398 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004399
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004400- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4401 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4402 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004403
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004404- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4405 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004407- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4408 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4409 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4410 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4411 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004412
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004413- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4414 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4415 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4416
4417- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4418 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4419 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004421- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4422 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4423 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4424 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004425 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004426
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004427- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4428 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004429
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004430- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4431 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004432
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004433- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004434 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004435 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4436 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004437
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004438
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004439What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004440===============================
4441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4443
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004444Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004446
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004447- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4448 with a custom metaclass.
4449
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004450Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004452
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004453- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4454 are proxies.
4455
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004456Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004458
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004459- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4460 very short strings.
4461
4462- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4463 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4464 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4465 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4466 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4467
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004468Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004470
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004471- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4472 close or delete time).
4473
4474- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4475 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4476
4477- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4478
4479- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004480 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004481
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004482Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004484
4485Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004487
4488C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004490
4491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004493
4494Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004496
4497Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004500- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4501
4502- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4503 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4504
4505- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4506 deleted at process exit time.
4507
4508- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4509 in backslash.
4510
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004511Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004513
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004514- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4515 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4516 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4517
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004518
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004519What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004520===========================
4521
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4523
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004524Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004526
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004527- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4528 been extensively updated. See
4529
4530 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4531
4532 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4533
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004534- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4535 deleted!
4536
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004537- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4538 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4539 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4540 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4541 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4542
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004543- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4544
4545 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4546 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4547
4548 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4549 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4550 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4551 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4552 supported anyway.
4553
4554 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4555 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4556
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004557- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4558 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4559 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4560 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4561 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004562
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004563- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4564 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4565 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4566
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004567Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004570- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4571 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4572 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4573 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4574 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4575 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004576 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4577 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4578 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4579 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004580
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004581- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4582 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4583 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4584
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004585Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004587
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004588- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4589
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004590Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004592
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004593- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4594 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4595 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4596 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4597 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4598 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4599
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004600- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4601
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004602- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4603
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004604- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4605
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004606- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4607 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4608 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4609
4610- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4611
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004612Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004614
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004615- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4616 off a search on Google.
4617
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004618Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004620
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004621- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4622 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4623 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4624 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4625 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4626 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4627 other platforms should do likewise.
4628
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004629- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4630 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4631 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4632
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004633C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004636- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4637 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4638 producing key-value pairs.
4639
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004640- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004641 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004642 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4643 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4644 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4645 previously went unchallenged.
4646
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004647New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004649
4650Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004652
4653Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655
4656Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004658
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004659- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4660 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004661
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004662- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4663 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4664 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4665 home.
4666
4667
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004668What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004669===========================
4670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4672
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004673Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004675
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004676- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4677 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004678
4679 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004680 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004681
4682 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4683 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004684 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004685 This needs to be documented.
4686
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004687- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4688 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4689
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004690- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4691 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4692 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4693
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004694- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4695 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4696
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004697- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4698 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4699 class forbids it).
4700
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004701- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4702 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4703 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4704
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004705- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004710- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4711 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004712 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004713
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004714- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4715 (like 1 + '').
4716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004717Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004719
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004720- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4721 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4722 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4723 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004724 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004725 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4726
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004727- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4728 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4729 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4730 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4731
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004732- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4733 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004734 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4735 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4736 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004737
4738- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4739 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004740
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004741- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4742 bytes on its input.
4743
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004744Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004746
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004747- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004748 convenience function.
4749
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004750- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4751 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4752 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004753 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4754 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4755 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4756 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4757 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4758 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004759
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004760- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4761 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4762 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4763 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4764
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004765- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4766 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4767 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4768
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004769- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4770 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4771 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4772 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4773
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004774- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4775 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4778 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4779 new -l and -e options.
4780
4781- statcache is now deprecated.
4782
4783- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4784 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004786 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4787 time properly taken into account.
4788
4789- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4790 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4791 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4792 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4793
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004794Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004796
4797Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004799
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004800- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4801 is built with libdb3 if available.
4802
4803- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4804
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004805C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004807
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004808- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4809 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4810 PySequence_Size().
4811
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004812- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4813
4814- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4815 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4816 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4817
4818- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4819 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4820
4821- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4822 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4823
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004824New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004826
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004827- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4828 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4829
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004830- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4831 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4832
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004833- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004837
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004838- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4839 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4840
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004843
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004844Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004846
4847- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4848 removed completely in the next release.
4849
4850- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4851 OSX.
4852
4853- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4854 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4855
4856- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4857
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004858
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004859What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004860===========================
4861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4863
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004864Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004866
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004867- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004868 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004869 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004870 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4871 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004872 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4873 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004874 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4875 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004876
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004877- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4878 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4879
4880- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4881 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4882
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004883Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004885
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004886- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4887 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4888 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4889 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4890 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4891 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4892 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4893 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4894
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004895- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4896 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4897 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4898 example).
4899
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004900- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004901 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004902 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004903 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004904
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004905- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4906 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4907 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004908 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004909
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004910- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4911 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4912 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4913 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4914 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4915 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4916
4917 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4918
4919 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4920
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004921Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004923
4924- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4925
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004926- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4927
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004928- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4929 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004930
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004931- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4932 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4933 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4934 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4935 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4936 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004937 attributes.
4938
4939- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4940 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4941 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004942
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004943- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4944 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4945 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004946
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004947- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4948 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4949 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004950 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4951 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4952
4953- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4954 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004955
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004956Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004958
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004959- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4960 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4961
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004962- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4963 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4964 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4965 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4966
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004967- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4968 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4969 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4970 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4971
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004972 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4973 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4974 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4975 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4976 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4977 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4978 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4979 without losing information).
4980
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004981- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004982 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4983 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4984 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4985 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4986 module).
4987
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004988 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004989 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4990 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4991 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4992 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004993
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004994- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004995 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4996 encoding.
4997
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004998- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4999 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005001- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005002 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5003
5004- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5005 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5006 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5007 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5008
5009- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5010
5011- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5012 ON, and OFF.
5013
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005014- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5015 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5016
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005017Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005019
5020- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5021 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5022 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005023
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005024- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5025 been added: -X and -E.
5026
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005027Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005029
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005030- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5031 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5032
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005033C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005035
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005036- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5037 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5038 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5039 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5040 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5041
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005042- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5043 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5044 as long) arguments.
5045
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005046- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5047 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5048 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5049 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5050 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5051 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5052
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005053- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5054 input.
5055
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005056New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005058
5059Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005061
5062Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005064
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005065- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5066 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5067 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5068
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005069- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5070 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5071 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005072 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005073
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5075 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5076 import signal
5077 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005078
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005080 while 1:
5081 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005083 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5084 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5085 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5086 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005087
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005088
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005089What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5090===========================
5091
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005092*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5093
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005094Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005096
5097- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5098 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5099 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5100
5101- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5102 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5103 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5104 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5105 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5106 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5107 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005108
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005109- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005110 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005111 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5112 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5113 associate a docstring with a property.
5114
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005115- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5116 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5117 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5118 other built-in object types.
5119
5120- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5121 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5122 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5123 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5124 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5125
5126- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5127 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5128
5129- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5130 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005131 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005132 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5133 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5134 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5135 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5136 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5137
5138- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5139 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5140 class.
5141
5142- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5143 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5144 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5145 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5146
5147- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5148 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5149 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5150 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5151
5152- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5153 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5154
5155- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5156 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5157 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5158 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5159 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005160 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005161 with the same value as s.
5162
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005163- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5164
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005165Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005167
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005168- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5169
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005170- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5171 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5172 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5173 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5174 objects.
5175
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005176- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5177 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005178 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5179 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5180
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005181- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5182 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5183 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5184
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005185Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005187
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005188- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5189 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5190 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5191 by the instances.
5192
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005193- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5194 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5195 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5196
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005197- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5198 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5199 before the entire comparison is complete.
5200
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005201- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5202 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5203 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5204
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005205- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5206 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5207 getwriter().
5208
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005209- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5210 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5211
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005212- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005213 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5214 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5215
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005216- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5217 iterable object.
5218
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005219- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5220 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005221
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005222- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5223 authentication.
5224
5225- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5226 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005227
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005228- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005229 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5230 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5231 a sample driver.)
5232
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005233Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005235
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005236- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5237 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5238 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5239 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5240 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5241 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5242 kernel has large file support.
5243
5244- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5245 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5246 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5247 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5248 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5249
5250- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5251 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5252 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5253
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005254C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005256
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005257- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5258 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5259
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005260New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005262
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005263- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5264 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5265
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005266Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005268
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005269- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5270 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5271 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5272 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5273 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5274
5275- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5276 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5277 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5278 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5279
5280- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5281 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5282
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005283Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005284-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005285
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005286- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005287 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5288 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005291What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5292===========================
5293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5295
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005296Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005298
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005299- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5300 big to represent as a C double.
5301
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005302- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5303 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5304 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5305 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5306 restriction).
5307
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005308- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5309 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5310 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5311 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5312 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5313
5314 >>> dir([])
5315 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5316 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5317 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5318 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5319 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5320 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5321 'reverse', 'sort']
5322
5323 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5324
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005325- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005326 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5327 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5328 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5329 OverflowError exception.
5330
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005331- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005332 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005333 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5334 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5335 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5336 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5337 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005338 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5340 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5341
5342 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5343 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5344 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5345 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005346
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005347- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005348 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5349 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5350 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5351 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5352 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5353 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5354 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5355 once it is created.
5356
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005357- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5358 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5359 (key, value) pairs.
5360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005361- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005362 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5363 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5364
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005365- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5366 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5367 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5368 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5369 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005370
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005371- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005372 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5373 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5374
5375 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5376
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005377- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005378 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5379
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005380Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005382
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005383- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005384 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5385 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005386
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005387- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5388 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5389 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5390 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5391 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5392 in this area anymore).
5393
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005394- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5395 threading.Timer.
5396
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005397- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5398 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5399
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005400- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005401 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5402
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005403- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005404 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5405 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5406 converted to Python longs.
5407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005408- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005409 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5410
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005411- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5412 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5413 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5414
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005415Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005417
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005418- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5419 division operators as per PEP 238.
5420
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005421Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005423
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005424- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5425 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5426 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5427 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5428
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005429C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005431
5432- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005433
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005434- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5435 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005436 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005437
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5439 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005440 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005443- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005444 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5445 module:
5446
5447 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005448
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005449 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5450 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005451
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005452 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5453 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005454
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005455 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5456
5457 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5458
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005459- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005460 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5461 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5462 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005463
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005464New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005466
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005467- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5468 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5469 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5470 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5471 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005472
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005473Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005474-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005475
5476Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005477-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005478
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005479- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5480 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5481 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5482 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005483 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5484 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5485 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5486 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5487 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005489- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005490 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5491
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005492
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005493What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5494===========================
5495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5497
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005498Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005500
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005501- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5502 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5503
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005504- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5505 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5506 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005507
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005508- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5509 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5510 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5511 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005512
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005513- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5514
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005515- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005516
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005517Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005519
5520- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005521 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005522 the module docstring for details.
5523
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005524Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005526
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005527- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005528 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5529 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5530 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005531
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005532- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5533 Nick Mathewson.
5534
5535Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005536----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005537
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005538- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5539 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5540 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5541 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5542 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5543 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5544 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5545 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5546
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005547- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5548 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5549 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5550 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5551
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005552- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5553 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5554 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5555 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5556 come a long way).
5557
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005558- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5559 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5560 write filters for these warnings).
5561
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005562- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5563 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5564 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5565 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5566 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5567
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005568- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5569 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5570 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5571 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5572 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5573 older distribution.
5574
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005575Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005577
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005578- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5579 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005580 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005581
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005582- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5583 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5584 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5585
5586- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5587
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005588- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5589
5590- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5591
5592- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5593
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005594- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005595
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005596- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5597
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005598New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005599-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005600
5601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005603
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005604- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5605 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5606 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5607 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5608 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5609 against buffer overruns.
5610
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005611- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005612 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5613 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005614 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5615 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5616 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5617
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005618- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5619 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5620 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5621 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5622 deprecated.
5623
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005624Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005625-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005626
5627- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5628 relevant is found.
5629
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005630
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005631What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005632===========================
5633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005634*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5635
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005636Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005638
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005639- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5640 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5641 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5642 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5643 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5644 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5645 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5646 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005647 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005648 repaired.
5649
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005650- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005651 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005652 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5653 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5654 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5655 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5656 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5657 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5658 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5659 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5660
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005661- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5662 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5663 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5664 leading BMO character).
5665
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005666- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5667 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5668 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5669
5670 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5671 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5672 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005673
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005674 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5675 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5676 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5677 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5678 for various simple to use conversions.
5679
5680 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5681 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005683 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5684 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5685 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5686 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5687 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5688 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5689 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5690 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5691 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5692 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5693 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5694 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5695 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5696 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5697 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005698
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005699- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5700 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5701 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005702 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005703 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005704
5705 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005706 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5707 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5708 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5709 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5710 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005711 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5712 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005713
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005714 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5715 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5716 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005717 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005718
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005719- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5720 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5721 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5722 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5723 floating arithmetic,
5724
5725 x = 9007199254740992.0
5726 print long(x)
5727
5728 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5729 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5730 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5731 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5732 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5733 functions are of good quality).
5734
5735 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5736 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5737 algorithms to break.
5738
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005739- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5740 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5741 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5742 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5743 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5744 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5745 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5746 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5747 order.
5748
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005749- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5750 operation along the most common code paths.
5751
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005752- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5753 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5754
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005755- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5756 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5757 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5758 {}.update(UserDict())
5759
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005760- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5761 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5762 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5763 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5764 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5765 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5766 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5767 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5768
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005769- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005770 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005772 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005773 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5774 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005775 join() method of strings
5776 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005777 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5778 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005779 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005780 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005781
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005782- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5783 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5784
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005785- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5786 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5787
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005788- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5789 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5790 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5791 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5792
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005793- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5794 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005795 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005796 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5797 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005798
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005799- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5800
5801
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005802Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005804
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005805- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005806 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005807 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5808 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5809
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005810- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5811 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5812
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005813- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5814 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5815 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5816 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5817
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005818- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5819 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5820 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5821
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005822- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5823
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005824- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5825
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005826- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5827 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5828 that are still imported into string.py).
5829
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005830- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5831
5832- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5833 Now it does.
5834
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005835- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5836
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005837- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5838 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5839 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5840 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5841 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005842 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5843 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005844
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005845- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5846 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5847 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5848 'help(object)'.
5849
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005850Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005851-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005852
5853- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005854 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005855 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5856 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5857
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005858- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005859 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5860 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005861
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005862C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005863-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005864
5865- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5866 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005867
5868----
5869
5870**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**