blob: b257e0ee43bda1c2a2906ee3196dbeb3fd1c11ce [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
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000015- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
16 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
17 message in this case.
18
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000019- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
20 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
21 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
22 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
23 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
24
25- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
26
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000027- Speed up some Unicode operations.
28
29- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
30
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000031- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000032 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
33
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000034- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
35
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000036- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
37 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
38
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000039- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
40
41- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
42
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000043- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
44 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
45 was empty.
46
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000047- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
48 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
49
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000050- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000051 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000052
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000053- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
54 codes.
55
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000056- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
57 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
58 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
59
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000060- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
61 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
62
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000063- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000064 (fixes bug #1119418).
65
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000066- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
67
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000068- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
69 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
70
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000071- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
72 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
73 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
74
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000075- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
76
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000077- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
78 reference counts in some error exit cases.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
81 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
82 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
83 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
84 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
85 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
86 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
87 realloc.
88
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000089- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
90 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
91
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000092- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
93 like their int counterparts.
94
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000095- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
96 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
97 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
98 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
99 for a longer write-up of the problem).
100
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000101- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
102 serializing floats.
103
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000104- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
105 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
106 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
107
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000108- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
109 278.
110
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000111- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
112 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
113 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
114 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000115 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116 PyNumber_*().
117 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
118
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000119- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
120 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
121 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
122 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
123
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000124- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
125 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
126 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
127 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
128 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
129
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000130- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
131 disabled caused a crash.
132
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000133- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
134 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
135
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000136- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000137 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
138
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000139- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
140
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000141- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000142 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
143 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
144 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000145
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000146- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
147
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000148- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
149 returning None.
150
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000151- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000152 ('\') with a specific error message.
153
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000154- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
155
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000156- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
157 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
158
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000159- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000160 an ferror() call.
161
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000162- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
163 list.sort().
164
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000165- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
166 (2+3) --> (5).
167
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000168- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
169
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000170- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
171 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000172
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000173- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
174 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
175 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
176
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000177- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
178 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
179 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
180
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000181Extension Modules
182-----------------
183
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000184- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
185
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000186- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
187
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000188- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
189 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
190
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000191- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
192
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000193- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
194 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
195
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000196- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
197
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000198- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
199 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
200
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000201- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
202 returns in cStringIO.c.
203
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000204- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
205 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
206
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000207- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
208
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000209- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
210
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000211- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
212 the file system encoding.
213
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000214- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
215 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000216
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000217- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
218
219- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000220 line without newlines.
221
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000222- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
223 on Windows.
224
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000225- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000226 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
227
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000228- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
229 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
230 for large or negative values.
231
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000232- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000233 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000234
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000235- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
236
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000237- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
238 if available on the platform.
239
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000240- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
241 available on the platform.
242
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000243- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
244 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
245
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000246- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
247
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000248- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
249 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
250 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
251
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000252- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
253
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000254- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
255 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
256
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000257- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000258 file size.
259
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000260- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
261
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000262- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
263 {remove_history,replace_history}
264
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000265- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
266 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000267
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000268- stat_float_times is now True.
269
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000270- array.array objects are now picklable.
271
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000272- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
273 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
274
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000275- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
276 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
277 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
278
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000279- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
280 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000281
282Library
283-------
284
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000285- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
286 is an error in the format string.
287
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000288- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
289
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000290- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000291 "parent" argument.
292
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000293- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
294 for padding.
295
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000296- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
297 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
298
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000299- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
300 to get the correct encoding.
301
302- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
303 languages.
304
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000305- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
306
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000307- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
308
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000309- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
310
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000311- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
312 functionality.
313
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000314- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
315
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000316- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
317 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
318
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000319- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
320 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
321 match the Content-Length header.
322
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000323- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
324
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000325- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
326 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000327 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000328
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000329- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
330
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000331- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
332
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000333- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
334 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
335
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000336- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
337 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
338 Tkdnd.
339
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000340- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
341 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
342
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000343- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
344 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
345
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000346- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000347 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
348
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000349- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
350 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
351
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000352- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
353 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
354
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000355- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000356 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000357
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000358- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
359
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000360- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
361 error messages.
362
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000363- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
364
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000365- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
366 Bug #1224621.
367
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000368- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
369 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
370 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
371 terminates by raising StopIteration.
372
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000373- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
374
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000375- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
376 component of the path.
377
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000378- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
379 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
380 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
381 class at all.
382
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000383- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
384 files to PyPI.
385
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000386- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
387 them to PyPI.
388
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000389- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
390 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
391 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
392 work as expected.
393
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000394- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
395 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
396
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000397- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000398 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
399
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000400- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
401
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000402- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
403 to build.
404
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000405- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
406 symbolic links on Windows.
407
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000408- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000409 profile.py if available.
410
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000411- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
412
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000413- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
414 in LWPCookieJar.
415
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000416- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
417
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000418- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
419
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000420- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
421
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000422- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
423
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000424- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
425
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000426- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
427
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000428- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
429
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000430- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
431
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000432- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
433 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
434 be exploited in various ways.
435
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000436- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
437
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000438- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
439
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000440- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
441
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000442- Enhancements to the csv module:
443
444 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000445 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000446 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000447 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
448 reporting.
449 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
450 dictates.
451 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000452 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000453 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000454 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
455 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000456 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
457 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000458 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000459 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
460 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
461 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
462 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
463 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
464 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
465 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
466 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
467 without first creating a dialect class.
468 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
469 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
470 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000471 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000472 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
473 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000474 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
475 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
476 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
477 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000478 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
479 This has been fixed.
480
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000481- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
482 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
483 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
484 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
485
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000486- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
487
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000488- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
489 (Bug #951915).
490
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000491- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
492 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
493 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000494 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000495
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000496- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
497
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000498- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
499 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
500
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000501- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
502
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000503- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
504
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000505- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
506
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000507- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
508
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000509- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
510
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000511- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
512 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
513 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
514
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000515- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000516 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000517
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000518- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
519 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
520 tokenizer with very long source lines.
521
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000522- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
523 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
524
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000525- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
526 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000527
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000528- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
529 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
530
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000531- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
532 correctly.
533
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000534- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
535 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
536 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
537 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
538 between two lines.
539
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000540- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
541 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
542 handlers.
543
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000544- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000545 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
546 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000547
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000548- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
549 considering it exactly like a '*'.
550
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000551- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
552 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000553
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000554Build
555-----
556
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000557- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
558 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
559
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000560- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
561 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
562
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000563- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
564 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
565 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000566 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000567
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000568- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
569 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
570 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
571
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000572- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
573
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000574- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
575 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
576
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000577- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
578 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
579 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
580 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
581 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
582 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
583 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
584 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
585
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000586- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
587 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
588 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
589 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
590
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000591
592C API
593-----
594
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000595- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
596
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000597- Removed PyRange_New().
598
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000599- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
600 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
601 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
602 mappings.
603
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000604
605Tests
606-----
607
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000608- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000609
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000610
611Documentation
612-------------
613
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000614- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
615
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000616- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
617
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000618- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
619
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000620- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
621
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000622- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
623
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000624- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
625
626- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
627
628- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
629
630- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
631
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000632- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
633 Closes bug #1166582.
634
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000635- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
636 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
637 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
638
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000639Mac
640---
641
642
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000643New platforms
644-------------
645
646- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
647
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000648
649Tools/Demos
650-----------
651
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000652- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
653 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
654 source files that need an encoding declaration.
655 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
656
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000657- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
658
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000659- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000660
661
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000662What's New in Python 2.4 final?
663===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000664
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000665*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000666
667Core and builtins
668-----------------
669
670- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
671 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
672 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
673
674
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000675What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
676==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000677
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000678*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000679
680Core and builtins
681-----------------
682
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000683- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
684 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
685 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
686
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000687
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000688Library
689-------
690
691- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
692 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
693 raised is re-raised.
694
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000695- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
696 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
697
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000698- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
699 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
700 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
701 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
702 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
703 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
704 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
705 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
706 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
707 by the slice are recomputed now.
708
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000709- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000710
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000711Build
712-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000713
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000714- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
715 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
716 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000717
718C API
719-----
720
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000721- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
722
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000723
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000724What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
725================================
726
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000727*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000728
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000729License
730-------
731
732The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
733is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
734changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
735Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
736intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
737durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
738the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
739License::
740
741 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
742
743says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
744to Python 2.1.1.
745
746The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
747License Version 2.
748
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000749Core and builtins
750-----------------
751
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000752- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
753 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
754 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
755 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
756 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
757 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
758 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
759 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
760 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
761 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
762
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000763- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000764
765Extension Modules
766-----------------
767
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000768- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
769 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
770 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
771 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000772
773Library
774-------
775
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000776- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
777 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
778 returned.
779
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000780- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
781
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000782- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
783 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
784
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000785- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
786
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000787- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
788 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000789
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000790- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
791
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000792- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
793
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000794- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000795 the source code is updated and reloaded.
796
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000797Build
798-----
799
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000800- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000801
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000802What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
803================================
804
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000805*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000806
807Core and builtins
808-----------------
809
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000810- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000811 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
812
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000813- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
814 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
815 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
816 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
817
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000818- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
819 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
820
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000821- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
822 constant.
823
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000824- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
825 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
826 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
827 large), and to anomalies such as
828 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
829 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
830 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
831 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000832
833Extension modules
834-----------------
835
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000836- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
837 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000838 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
839 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
840 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000841
842Library
843-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000844
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000845- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000846 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000847 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
848 --swig-cpp.
849
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000850- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
851 it is set.
852
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000853- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000854
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000855- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
856 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
857 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
858 Closes bug #1039270.
859
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000860- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000861
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000862 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000863 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
864 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
865 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
866 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
867 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
868 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
869 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
870 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
871 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
872 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
873 + Updates to documentation.
874
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000875- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
876 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
877 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
878 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
879
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000880- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000881
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000882- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
883 applications should use the getmember function.
884
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000885- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
886
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000887- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
888 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
889 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
890 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
891 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
892 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
893 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
894 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
895 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
896
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000897- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
898 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000899 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000900
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000901- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
902 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
903 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
904 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
905 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
906 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
907 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
908 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000909
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000910- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
911 the new public features (of which there are many).
912
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000913- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000914 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
915 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
916 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
917 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000918 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000919
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000920- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
921
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000922- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
923 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
924 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
925 options.
926
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000927- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
928 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
929 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
930 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
931 conditions under which non-string values work.
932
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000933Build
934-----
935
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000936- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
937 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
938 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
939
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000940- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
941 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
942 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
943 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
944 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000945
946C API
947-----
948
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000949- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
950 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
951
952- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
953
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000954- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
955 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
956 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
957 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
958 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
959 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
960 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
961 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
962 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
963
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000964- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
965
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000966- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
967 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
968 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000969
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000970Tests
971-----
972
973- test__locale ported to unittest
974
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000975Mac
976---
977
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000978- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
979 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
980 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000981
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000982Tools/Demos
983-----------
984
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000985- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
986 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
987 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
988 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
989 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000990
991
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000992What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
993=================================
994
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000995*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000996
997Core and builtins
998-----------------
999
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001000- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001001 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1002
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001003- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1004 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1005 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1006 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1007 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1008 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1009 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1010 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001011 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1012 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1013 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1014 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1015 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001016
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001017- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1018 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1019 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1020 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1021 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1022
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001023- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1024
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001025- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1026 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1027
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001028- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1029 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1030 modified the list.
1031
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001032- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1033 functions is now writable.
1034
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001035- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1036 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1037 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1038 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1039
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001040- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1041 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1042 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1043 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1044 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001045
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001046- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1047 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1048
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001049Extension modules
1050-----------------
1051
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001052- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1053
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001054- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1055 data.
1056
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001057- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1058 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1059 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1060 supposed to have been truncated away.
1061
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001062- Added socket.socketpair().
1063
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001064- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1065 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1066
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001067- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001068 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1069
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001070Library
1071-------
1072
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001073- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001074 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001075
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001076- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1077 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1078
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001079- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1080 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1081
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001082- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1083
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001084- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1085 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001086
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001087- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1088 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1089
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001090- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1091
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001092- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1093
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001094- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1095
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001096- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1097 Percivall.
1098
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001099- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1100 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1101
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001102- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1103 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1104 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001105 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001106
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001107- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1108 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1109 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1110 and exponent.
1111
1112- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1113
1114- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001115 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001116 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1117
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001118- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1119 to the readline module.
1120
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001121- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001122 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1123 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001124
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001125- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1126 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1127 contains symlinks.
1128
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001129- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1130 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1131
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001132- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1133 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1134 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1135
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001136- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1137 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1138 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1139 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1140 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1141 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1142 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1143 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1144 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1145 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1146 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1147 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1148 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1149
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001150- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1151
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001152Tools/Demos
1153-----------
1154
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001155- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1156 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1157
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001158- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1159
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001160Build
1161-----
1162
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001163- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1164 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1165 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1166 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1167 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1168 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1169 plans to do so.
1170
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001171- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1172 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1173
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001174- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1175 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1176
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001177- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1178 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1179
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001180- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1181 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1182
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001183- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1184 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1185
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001186C API
1187-----
1188
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001189..
1190
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001191Documentation
1192-------------
1193
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001194- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1195 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1196
1197- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1198 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1199 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001200
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001201New platforms
1202-------------
1203
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001204- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1205
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001206Tests
1207-----
1208
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001209..
1210
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001211Windows
1212-------
1213
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001214- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1215 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1216 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1217 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1218 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1219 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1220 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1221 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1222 the problem.
1223
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001224Mac
1225---
1226
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001227..
1228
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001229
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001230What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1231=================================
1232
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001233*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001234
1235Core and builtins
1236-----------------
1237
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001238- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1239 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1240 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1241 sensitive code.
1242
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001243- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001244 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001245
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001246 @staticmethod
1247 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001248
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001249 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001250
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001251- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1252 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1253 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1254 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1255 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1256 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1257 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1258 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1259 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1260 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1261 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1262
1263 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1264 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1265 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1266 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1267 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1268 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1269 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1270
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001271- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1272 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1273
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001274- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001275 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001276
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001277- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001278 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001279 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1280
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001281- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001282 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1283 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1284
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001285- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1286 types that support garbage collection.
1287
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001288- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1289
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001290- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1291 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1292 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1293 Jython.
1294
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001295- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1296
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001297- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1298 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1299
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001300- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1301 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1302 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001303
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001304- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1305 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1306 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1307
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001308Extension modules
1309-----------------
1310
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001311- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1312
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001313Library
1314-------
1315
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001316- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1317 TIS-620
1318
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001319- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1320 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1321 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1322 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1323 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1324 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1325 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1326 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1327 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1328 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1329
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001330- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1331
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001332- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1333 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1334 same as when the argument is omitted).
1335 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1336
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001337- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1338
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001339- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1340 schemes are offered.
1341
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001342- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1343
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001344- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1345 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1346 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1347
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001348- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1349
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001350- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1351 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1352
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001353- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1354 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1355 when dummy_threading is being used.
1356
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001357- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1358 from a tarfile.
1359
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001360- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001361 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001362
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001363- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1364 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1365 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1366 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1367
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001368- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1369 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1370
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001371- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1372 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1373 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1374 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1375 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1376 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1377 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1378 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1379 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1380 by some other method in progress).
1381
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001382- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1383 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1384 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001385
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001386- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1387
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001388- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1389 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1390 AM Kuchling.
1391
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001392- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1393 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1394 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1395
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001396- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1397 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1398 instead of unsigned.
1399
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001400- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001401 no longer part of the public API.
1402
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001403- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1404 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1405 string methods of the same name).
1406
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001407- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001408 SF patch 945642.
1409
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001410- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1411
1412 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1413
1414 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1415 DocTestSuites.
1416
1417- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1418 that provide thread-local data.
1419
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001420- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1421 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1422
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001423- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1424
1425- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1426 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1427 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1428
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001429- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1430
1431 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1432 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1433 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001434
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001435 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1436 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1437 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1438 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1439
1440 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1441 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1442
1443 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1444 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1445 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1446 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1447
1448 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1449 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1450 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1451 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1452 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1453
1454 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1455 wrapping help output.
1456
1457 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1458 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1459 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001460
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001461C API
1462-----
1463
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001464- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1465 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1466 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1467 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1468 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1469 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1470 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1471 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1472 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1473 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1474 its visible semantics have not changed.
1475
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001476- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1477 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1478
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001479Documentation
1480-------------
1481
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001482- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001483
1484 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001485 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001486
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001487 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001488
1489 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1490
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001491- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001492
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001493Tests
1494-----
1495
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001496- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001497 platforms that use the Makefile.
1498
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001499- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1500 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1501 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1502
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001503
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001504What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1505=================================
1506
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001507*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001508
1509Core and builtins
1510-----------------
1511
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001512- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1513 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1514 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1515 objects now (one object instead of three).
1516
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001517- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1518 Windows DLLs.
1519
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001520- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1521 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001522
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001523- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1524 a new .pyc magic.
1525
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001526- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1527 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1528 be there.
1529
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001530- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1531 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1532 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1533
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001534- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1535 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1536 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1537
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001538- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1539
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001540- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1541 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1542 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001543
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001544- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1545 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1546
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001547- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1548
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001549- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001550 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001551
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001552- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1553
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001554- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1555
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001556- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1557 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1558
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001559- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1560 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1561 Fixes bug #858016 .
1562
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001563- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1564 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1565 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1566
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001567- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1568 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1569 improves their performance (about 35%).
1570
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001571- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1572 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1573 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1574
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001575- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1576 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1577 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1578 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1579
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001580- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1581 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001582 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001583 length is not known).
1584
1585- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1586 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001587 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1588 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001589 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1590
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001591- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1592 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1593
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001594- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1595 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1596 keyword arguments.
1597
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001598- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1599 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1600 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1601
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001602- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1603 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1604 cases.
1605
1606- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1607 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1608 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1609 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1610 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1611 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1612 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1613 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1614 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1615 a release build.
1616
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001617- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1618 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1619
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001620- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001621 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001622
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001623- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1624 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1625 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1626 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1627 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1628 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1629 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1630 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1631 destroyed.
1632
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001633- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1634 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1635 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1636 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1637 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1638 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1639 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1640 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1641
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001642- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1643 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1644 character other than a space.
1645
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001646- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1647 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1648 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1649 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1650 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1651 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1652 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1653 attributes with the same name.
1654
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001655- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1656 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1657 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1658 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1659 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1660 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1661 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1662 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1663 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1664 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1665 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1666 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1667 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1668 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001669
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001670- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1671 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1672 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1673 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1674 This has been repaired.
1675
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001676- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1677
1678- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1679
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001680- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1681 over a sequence.
1682
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001683- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001684 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001685
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001686- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1687
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001688- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1689 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1690 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1691 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1692 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1693 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1694 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1695 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1696
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001697- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1698 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1699 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1700
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001701- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1702 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1703 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1704 freelist.
1705
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001706- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1707 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1708
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001709- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1710 number.
1711
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001712- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1713 a TypeError exception.
1714
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001715- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1716 820195.
1717
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001718- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1719 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1720 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1721
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001722- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001723 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1724 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001725
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001726- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1727 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1728 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1729
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001730- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1731 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001732 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001733
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001734- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001735 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1736 the first call.
1737
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001738
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001739Extension modules
1740-----------------
1741
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001742- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1743 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1744
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001745- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1746 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1747 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1748 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1749 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1750 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1751 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001752
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001753- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1754
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001755- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1756
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001757- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1758 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1759
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001760- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1761 fewer false positives.
1762
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001763- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1764 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1765
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001766- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001767 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1768
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001769- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001770 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001771 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001772 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1773 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001774
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001775- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1776 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1777 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1778 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1779
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001780- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1781 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1782 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1783 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1784 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1785 #897625.
1786
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001787- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1788 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1789
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001790- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1791 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1792 and pops on either side of the deque.
1793
1794- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1795 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1796
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001797- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1798 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1799 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1800 other functions that expect a function argument.
1801
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001802- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1803
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001804- os.getsid was added.
1805
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001806- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1807 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1808 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1809
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001810- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1811
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001812- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1813
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001814- readline.clear_history was added.
1815
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001816- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1817
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001818- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1819
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001820- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1821
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001822- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1823
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001824- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1825
1826- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1827
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001828- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1829
1830- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1831
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001832- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1833 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1834 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1835
1836- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1837 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1838 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1839 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1840 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1841 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1842 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1843
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001844- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1845 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1846 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1847 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001848
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001849- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001850 iterators from a single iterable.
1851
1852- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1853 of raising a TypeError exception.
1854
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001855- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1856 as parameter.
1857
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001858Library
1859-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001860
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001861- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1862
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001863- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1864 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1865 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001866
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001867- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1868 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1869 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001870
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001871- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001872
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001873- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1874 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001875
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001876- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1877 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1878
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001879- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1880
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001881- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001882 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001883
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001884- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001885 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001886
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001887- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1888
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001889- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1890 on cygwin and mingw32.
1891
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001892- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1893
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001894- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1895 module.
1896
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001897- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1898 installation scheme for all platforms.
1899
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001900- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001901 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001902
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001903- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1904 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1905 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1906
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001907- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1908 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1909 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1910
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001911- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1912
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001913- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1914
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001915- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1916 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1917
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001918- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1919 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1920 type pattern with the same value exists.
1921
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001922- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1923 when run from the command prompt).
1924
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001925- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1926 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1927
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001928- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1929 default sort).
1930
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001931- Added global runctx function to profile module
1932
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001933- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1934
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001935- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1936
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001937- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1938
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001939- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001940 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1941 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1942 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1943 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1944 accordingly.
1945
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001946- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1947 decoding standards.
1948
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001949- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1950 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1951 called for all requests.
1952
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001953- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1954 they are passed to the compiler.
1955
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001956- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1957 indent, width and depth.
1958
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001959- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1960 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1961
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001962- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1963 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1964
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001965- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1966
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001967- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1968
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001969- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1970
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001971- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1972 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1973
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001974- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001975 for better performance.
1976
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001977- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001978
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001979- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1980 a string).
1981
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001982- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1983
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001984- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1985
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001986- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1987
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001988- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1989
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001990- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1991 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1992 list of fieldnames.
1993
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001994- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1995 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1996
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001997- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1998
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001999- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2000 empty lists.
2001
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002002- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2003 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2004 and shelves.
2005
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002006- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2007 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2008
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002009- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002010 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2011 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002012
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002013- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2014 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002015 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002016
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002017- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002018 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2019 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2020
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002021- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2022 and removed in Py2.4.
2023
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002024- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2025
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002026- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2027
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002028Tools/Demos
2029-----------
2030
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002031- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2032 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2033
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002034- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2035
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002036- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2037 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2038 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2039 destination in situations where both files are given.
2040
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002041- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2042 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2043 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2044 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2045
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002046- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2047
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002048- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2049 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2050 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2051 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2052 now.
2053
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002054- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2055 in effect
2056
2057- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2058 C-c C-h
2059
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002060- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2061 -d option was given.
2062
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002063Build
2064-----
2065
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002066- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2067 build under OS X.
2068
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002069- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2070 --enable-profiling.
2071
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002072- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2073 is configured --with-tsc.
2074
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002075- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2076 on AMD64.
2077
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002078- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2079 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2080
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002081- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2082 removed.
2083
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002084- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2085 supported (see PEP 11).
2086
2087- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2088
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002089- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2090
2091- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2092 (see PEP 11).
2093
2094- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2095 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2096
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002097C API
2098-----
2099
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002100- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2101 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2102 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2103
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002104- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2105 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2106 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2107 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2108
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002109- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2110 generator objects.
2111
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002112- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2113 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002114 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2115 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002116
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002117- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2118 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2119
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002120- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2121 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2122 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2123 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2124 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2125
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002126- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2127 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2128 about 10% faster.
2129
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002130- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2131 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2132
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002133- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2134 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2135 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2136 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2137
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002138Windows
2139-------
2140
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002141- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2142 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2143 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2144 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2145
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002146- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2147 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2148 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2149
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002150
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002151What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2152===============================
2153
2154*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2155
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002156IDLE
2157----
2158
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002159- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2160 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2161 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2162 context-menu actions.
2163
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002164- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2165 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2166 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2167 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2168 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2169 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2170 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2171 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2172 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2173
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002174
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002175What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2176=============================================
2177
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002178*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002179
2180Core and builtins
2181-----------------
2182
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002183- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002184 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002185 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2186
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002187Extension modules
2188-----------------
2189
2190- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2191 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2192 than once. This has been fixed.
2193
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002194- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2195 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2196 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2197 call.
2198
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002199- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2200
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002201Library
2202-------
2203
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002204- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2205 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2206
2207- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2208 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2209 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2210 restored.
2211
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002212IDLE
2213----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002214
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002215- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002216
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002217Build
2218-----
2219
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002220- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2221 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2222
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002223C API
2224-----
2225
2226Windows
2227-------
2228
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002229- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2230 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2231
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002232- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2233
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002234Mac
2235---
2236
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002237- Various fixes to pimp.
2238
2239- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2240
2241- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2242 more problems than it solves.
2243
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002244
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002245What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2246=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002247
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002248*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2249
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002250Core and builtins
2251-----------------
2252
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002253- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2254 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2255
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002256- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2257 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002258 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002259
2260- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2261 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2262 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002263 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002264
2265- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2266 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002267
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002268- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2269 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2270 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2271
2272- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002273 770247.
2274
2275- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002276
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002277Extension modules
2278-----------------
2279
2280- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2281 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2282
2283- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2284
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002285- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2286
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002287- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2288 contained within the _strptime module.
2289
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002290- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2291 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2292
2293- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002294 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2295
2296- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2297 the find_class attribute, if present.
2298
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002299- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300
2301 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2302 (SF bug 763298).
2303
2304 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002305 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2306 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2307 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002308
2309 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2310
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002311Library
2312-------
2313
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002314- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2315
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002316- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2317 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2318 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2319 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2320 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2321 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2322 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2323 or Tester().
2324
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002325- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2326 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2327 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2328 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2329 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2330 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2331 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2332 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2333 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002334
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002335 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002336
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002337- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2338 weren't before was an oversight.
2339
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002340- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2341 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2342
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002343- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2344 when there are no lines.
2345
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002346- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2347 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2348
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002349- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2350 to child processes.
2351
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002352- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2353
2354- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2355
2356- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2357 xmlrpclib.
2358
2359- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2360 responses.
2361
2362- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2363 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2364
2365- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2366 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2367 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2368
2369- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2370 used as patterns.
2371
2372- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2373 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2374 than Tk 8.3.
2375
2376- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2377
2378- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002379
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002380Tools/Demos
2381-----------
2382
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002383- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2384
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002385- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2386
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002387- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002388
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002389Build
2390-----
2391
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002392- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2393
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002394- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2395
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002396- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2397 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002398
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002399- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2400 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2401 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002402
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002403C API
2404-----
2405
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002406- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2407 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2408
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002409Windows
2410-------
2411
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002412- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2413 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2414 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2415 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2416 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2417 Python exception ::
2418
2419 thread.error: can't start new thread
2420
2421 is raised now.
2422
2423- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2424 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2425 instead of from DLL teardown.
2426
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002427Mac
2428---
2429
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002430- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002431 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002432 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2433 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2434 the executable in the bundle.
2435
2436- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002437
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002438- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2439
2440- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2441 on Panther.
2442
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002443What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2444================================
2445
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002446*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002447
2448Core and builtins
2449-----------------
2450
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002451- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2452 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2453 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2454 with the -i option.
2455
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002456- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2457 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2458
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002459- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2460 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2461
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002462- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2463 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2464 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2465 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2466 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2467 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2468 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2469 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2470 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2471 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2472 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2473 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2474 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002475
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002476- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2477 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2478 embedded in a lambda expression.
2479
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002480- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2481 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2482 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2483 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2484 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2485
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002486- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2487 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2488 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2489
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002490- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2491 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2492
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002493- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2494 It's writable again.
2495
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002496- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2497 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2498 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002499 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002500
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002501- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2502 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2503 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2504
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002505Extension modules
2506-----------------
2507
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002508- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2509 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2510
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002511- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2512 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2513 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2514 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2515
2516- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2517 collection.
2518
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002519- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2520 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2521 unique within a single program run.
2522
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002523- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2524 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2525
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002526- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2527 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2528
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002529- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2530 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002531
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002532- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2533
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002534- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2535 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2536
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002537- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2538 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2539 for many BSD-derived systems.
2540
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002541
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002542Library
2543-------
2544
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002545- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2546 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2547 primary ones:
2548
2549 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2550 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2551 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2552
2553 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2554 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2555 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2556 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2557 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2558 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2559
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002560- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2561 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2562 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2563 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2564 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2565 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2566 argument.
2567
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002568- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2569 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2570 in the archive.
2571
2572- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2573 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2574
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002575- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2576 569574).
2577
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002578- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2579 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2580 no more.
2581
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002582- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2583 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2584 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2585 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2586 code coverage.
2587
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002588- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2589 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2590 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002591 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2592 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002593
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002594- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2595 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2596 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002597 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002598
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002599- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2600
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002601- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2602 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2603 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2604 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2605
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002606- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2607 handling.
2608
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002609- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2610 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2611
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002612- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2613 in socket.py.
2614
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002615- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2616
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002617- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2618 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2619 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2620 opener with proxy support.
2621
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002622- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2623
2624- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002626Tools/Demos
2627-----------
2628
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002629- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2630
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002631- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2632
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002633- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2634 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002635
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002636- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2637 files.
2638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002639Build
2640-----
2641
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002642- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002643 different root directory.
2644
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002645C API
2646-----
2647
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002648- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2649 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2650 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2651 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2652 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2653 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2654 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2655 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2656 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2657 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2658
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002659- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2660 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2661 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2662 from Python.
2663
2664
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002665New platforms
2666-------------
2667
2668None this time.
2669
2670Tests
2671-----
2672
2673- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2674 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2675
2676Windows
2677-------
2678
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002679- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2680
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002681- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2682 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2683 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2684 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2685 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2686 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2687 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2688 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2689 that's what it's for.
2690
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002691Mac
2692---
2693
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002694- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2695 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2696 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2697 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002698- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2699 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2700- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002701
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002702SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2703------------------------------------
2704
2705430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2706598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2707622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2708661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2709683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2710697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2711713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2712724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2713727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2714729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2715730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2716731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2717732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2718733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2719735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2720740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2721744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2722745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2723747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2724749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2725751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2726753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2727755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2728757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2729760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2730
2731
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002732What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2733================================
2734
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002735*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002736
2737Core and builtins
2738-----------------
2739
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002740- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2741 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2742
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002743- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2744 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2745 and cannot be strings).
2746
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002747- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2748 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2749 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2750 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2751
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002752- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2753 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2754 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2755 Python itself.
2756
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002757- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2758 the referenced object, if it has one.
2759
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002760- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2761 the thread started at
2762 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2763
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002764- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2765 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2766 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2767 placed on a list index.
2768
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002769- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2770 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2771 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2772 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2773
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002774- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2775 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2776 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2777 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2778 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2779 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2780 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2781
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002782- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2783 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2784 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2785 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2786 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2787
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002788- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2789 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002790
2791- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2792 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2793 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2794 #693195.)
2795
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002796- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2797 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002798
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002799- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002800 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002801 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2802 interpreter executions, would fail.
2803
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002804- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002805 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002806 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002807
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002808Extension modules
2809-----------------
2810
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002811- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2812 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2813 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2814 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2815
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002816- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2817 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2818
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002819- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2820 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2821 and Greg Chapman.)
2822
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002823- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2824 recursively.
2825
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002826- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002827 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2828 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2829 leaks.
2830
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002831- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2832
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002833- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2834 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2835 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2836 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2837 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2838 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2839 #705836.
2840
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002841- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002842 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2843
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002844- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2845 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2846 See SF bug #692416.
2847
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002848- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2849 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2850
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002851- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2852 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2853 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002854
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002855- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002856 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2857 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2858
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002859- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2860 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2861 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2862 timeouts to work properly.
2863
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002864Library
2865-------
2866
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002867- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2868 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2869 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2870 future release.
2871
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002872- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2873 for querying platform dependent features.
2874
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002875- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002876
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002877- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2878 pickle protocol versions.
2879
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002880- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2881 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2882 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2883
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002884- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2885
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002886- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2887 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2888 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2889 modules.
2890
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002891- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2892 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2893 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2894
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002895- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2896 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2897
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002898- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2899 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2900 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2901
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002902- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002903 MS Office extensions.
2904
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002905- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2906 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2907
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002908- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2909 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2910
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002911- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2912 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2913 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2914 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2915 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2916 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2917
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002918- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2919 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2920 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002921
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002922- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2923 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2924 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2925
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002926- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2927
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002928- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2929 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2930 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2931
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002932Tools/Demos
2933-----------
2934
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002935- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2936 See the module docstring for details.
2937
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002938Build
2939-----
2940
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002941- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2942 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002943
2944C API
2945-----
2946
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002947- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2948
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002949- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2950 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2951 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2952
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002953- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2954 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002955
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002956 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2957 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2958 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002959
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002960- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002961 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2962
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002963- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2964 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2965 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002966
2967New platforms
2968-------------
2969
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002970None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002971
2972Tests
2973-----
2974
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002975- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2976 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002977
2978Windows
2979-------
2980
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002981- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2982 function.
2983
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002984- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2985 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002986
2987Mac
2988---
2989
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002990- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2991 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002992
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002993- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2994 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002995
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002996- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2997 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2998 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002999
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003000- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003001 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3002 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003003
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003004- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3005 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003006
3007
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003008What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3009=================================
3010
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003011*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003012
3013Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003014-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003015
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003016- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3017 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3018 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3019
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003020- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3021 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3022 (SF patch #664376.)
3023
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003024- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3025 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3026 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3027 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3028 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3029 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003030 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003031
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003032- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3033 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3034 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3035 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003036 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003037
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003038- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3039 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3040 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3041 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3042 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3043 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3044 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3045 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3046 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3047 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3048 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3049
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003050- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3051 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3052 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3053 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3054 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3055 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3056
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003057- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3058 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3059
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003060- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3061 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3062 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3063 case.)
3064
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003065- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3066 passed as unicode strings.
3067
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003068- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3069 See SF bug #683467.
3070
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003071- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3072 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3073
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003074- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3075
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003076- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3077
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003078- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3079 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3080 arguments.
3081
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003082- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3083 See SF bug #667147.
3084
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003085- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003086 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003087 See SF bug #676155.
3088
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003089- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003090 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003091 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3092 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3093 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3094 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3095 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3096 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003097
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003098Extension modules
3099-----------------
3100
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003101- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3102 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3103 tp_as_number pointer.
3104
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003105- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3106 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3107 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3108 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3109 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3110
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003111- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3112
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003113- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3114
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003115- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003116 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003117 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3118 patch #678531.)
3119
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003120- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3121 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3122
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003123- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3124 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3125
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003126- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3127
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003128- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3129 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3130 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3131
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003132- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3133
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003134- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3135 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3136
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003137- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003138
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003139- datetime changes:
3140
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003141 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3142
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003143 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3144 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3145 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3146 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3147 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3148 now.
3149
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003150 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003151 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3152 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003153
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003154 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003155 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003156 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3157 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3158 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3159 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003160
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003161 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3162 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3163 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003164 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3165
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003166 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3167 by a later example coded by Guido.
3168
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003169 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003170 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3171 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3172 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003173 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3174 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3175
3176 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3177 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3178 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3179 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3180 tzinfo subclass instance.
3181
3182 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3183 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3184 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3185 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3186 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3187 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3188 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3189 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003190
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003191 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3192 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3193 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3194 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3195 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003196 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3197
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003198 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003199
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003200 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3201 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3202 as a naive datetime object.
3203
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003204 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3205 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3206 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3207
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003208 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3209 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3210 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3211 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3212 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3213 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3214 comparison.
3215
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003216 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3217 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3218 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3219 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003220 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003221
3222 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003223
3224 and ::
3225
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003226 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3227
3228 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3229 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3230 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3231 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3232
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003233 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3234 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3235 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3236 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3237 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3238
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003239 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3240 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003241 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3242 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003244Library
3245-------
3246
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003247- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3248 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3249
3250- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3251 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3252 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3253 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3254 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3255 See PEP 307 for details.
3256
3257- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3258 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3259
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003260- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3261 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003262 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003263 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3264 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003265 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003266
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003267- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3268 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3269
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003270- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3271 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3272 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3273
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003274- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3275
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003276- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3277 exception.
3278
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003279- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3280 class.
3281
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003282- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3283 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3284 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3285
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003286- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3287 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3288
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003289- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003290 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3291 See SF bug #659228.
3292
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003293- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3294 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3295 See SF patch #651082.
3296
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003297- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003298
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003299- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3300 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3301
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003302- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003303 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003304
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003305- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3306 DOS paths from other platforms.
3307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003308Tools/Demos
3309-----------
3310
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003311- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3312 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3313 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3314 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3315 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3316 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3317 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3318 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3319 example:
3320
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003321 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3322 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003323
3324 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3325
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003326
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003327Build
3328-----
3329
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003330- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3331 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3332 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003333 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3334
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003335 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3336
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003337- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3338 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3339 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3340 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3341 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3342 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3343 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3344 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3345 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3346
3347- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3348 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3349 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3350 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3351
3352- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3353 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003355C API
3356-----
3357
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003358- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3359 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003360
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003361- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3362 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3363 tp_as_number pointer.
3364
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003365- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3366 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3367 (SF #681367)
3368
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003369- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3370 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3371 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3372 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003374Tests
3375-----
3376
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003377- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003378 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3379 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3380 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3381 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3382 pydoc.)
3383
3384- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3385
3386- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003387
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003388Windows
3389-------
3390
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003391- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3392 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3393 time).
3394
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003395- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3396 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3397
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003398- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3399 release without strong cryptography.
3400
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003401- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003402 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003403
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003404- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3405 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3406
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003407Mac
3408---
3409
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003410- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3411 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003412
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003413- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3414 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3415 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003416
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003417- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3418 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003419
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003420- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3421 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3422 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3423 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003424
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003425- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003426 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3427 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3428 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003429
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003430
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003431What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003432=================================
3433
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003434*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003436Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003438
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003439- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3440
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003441- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3442 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003443 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003444 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003445 a different meaning than before.
3446
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003447- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003448 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003449 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003450
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003451- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003452 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003453 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003454
3455- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3456 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3457 and deallocation.
3458
3459- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3460 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3461
3462- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3463 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3464 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3465 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3466 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3467
3468- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3469 now detected by the garbage collector.
3470
3471- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3472 [SF bug 519621]
3473
3474- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3475 identifier.
3476
3477- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3478 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3479 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3480 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3481 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3482 [SF bug 563060]
3483
3484- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3485 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3486 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3487 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3488 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3489
3490- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3491 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3492 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3493
3494- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3495
3496- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3497 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3498 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3499 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3500 state of the slots would be lost.)
3501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003504
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003505- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003506 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3507 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3508 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3509 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003510 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3511 Jython 2.1.
3512
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003513- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003514 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003515 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3516 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3517 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3518 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3519 these, see PEP 302.
3520
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003521- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3522 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3523 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3524
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003525- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3526 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3527 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3528
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003529- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3530 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3531 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3532
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003533- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3534 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3535 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3536 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3537 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3538 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3539 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3540 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3541 releases or implementations.
3542
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003543- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003544 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3545 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003546
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003547- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3548 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3549
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003550- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3551 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3552 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3553
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003554- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3555 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3556
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003557- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3558 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003559 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3560 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003561
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003562- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3563 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3564 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3565 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3566 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3567
3568 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3569 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3570 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3571 pattern.
3572
3573 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3574 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3575 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3576 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3577
3578 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3579 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3580 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3581 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3582 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3583 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3584
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003585- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3586 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3587 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3588 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3589 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3590 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3591 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3592 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003593
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003594- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3595 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3596 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3597 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3598 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003599 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3600 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3601 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3602 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3603 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3604 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3605 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003606
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003607- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3608 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3609
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003610- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3611 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3612 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3613 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3614 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3615 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3616 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3617 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3618 to Zack Weinberg!
3619
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003620- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3621 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3622 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3623 type. This has been fixed now.
3624
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003625- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3626 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3627 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3628
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003629- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3630 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3631 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3632 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3633 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3634 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3635 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3636 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003637 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003638
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003639- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3640 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3641 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003642
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003643- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3644 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3645 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3646 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3647 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3648 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3649 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3650 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003651 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003652 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3653 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3654
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003655- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3656 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3657 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3658 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3659 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3660 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3661 this.)
3662
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003663- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3664 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003665 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003666 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003667 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3668 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003669 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3670 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003671
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003672- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3673 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3674 currently running.
3675
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003676- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3677 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3678 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3679 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3680
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003681- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3682 as directory names.
3683
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003684- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3685 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3686
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003687- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3688 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3689
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003690- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003691 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3692 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003693
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003694- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3695 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3696 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3697 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3698 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3699
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003700- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3701 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3702 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3703 removed.
3704
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003705- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3706 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3707 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3708
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003709- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3710 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3711 to __debug__.
3712
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003713- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3714 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3715 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3716
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003717- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3718 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3719 deprecated now.
3720
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003721- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3722 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3723 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003724
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003725- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3726 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3727 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3728 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3729 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003730
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003731- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3732 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3733
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003734- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3735 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3736 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003737 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003738 is backward compatible.
3739
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003740- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3741 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3742 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3743 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3744 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3745
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003746- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3747 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3748 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3749 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3750 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3751 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003752
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003753- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3754 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3755
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003756- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3757 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3758
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003759- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3760 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3761 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3762 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3763 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3764
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003765- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3766 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3767 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3768
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003769- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003770 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3771
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003772- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3773 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3774 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003775
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003776- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3777 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3778
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003779- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3780 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3781 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3782
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003783- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3784
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003785Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003787
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003788- Added three operators to the operator module:
3789 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3790 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3791 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3792
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003793- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3794
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003795- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3796 archives.
3797
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003798- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3799 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3800 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3801
3802 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3803
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003804- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3805 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3806 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003807 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003808
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003809- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3810 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3811 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3812 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003813 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3814 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3815 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3816 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003817
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003818- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3819 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003820
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003821- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3822
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003823- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3824 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3825
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003826- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3827 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3828 supported.
3829
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003830- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3831
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003832- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3833 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003834
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003835- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3836 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3837
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003838- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3839
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003840- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3841 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3842
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003843- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3844 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3845 functions but callable type objects.
3846
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003847- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003848 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003849 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003850
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003851- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3852 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003853
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003854- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3855 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003856
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003857- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3858 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3859 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3860 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3861
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003862- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3863 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003864
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003865- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3866 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3867 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3868 and __imul__.
3869
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003870- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003871 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3872 is called.
3873
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003874- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3875 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3876 interpreter was compiled.
3877
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003878- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3879 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3880 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003881 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003882 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3883 1, not 2.
3884
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003885- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3886 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3887 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3888 limit.
3889
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003890- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3891 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3892 bug #623464.
3893
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003894- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3895 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3896 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3897 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3898
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003899Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003901
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003902- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3903
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003904- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3905 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3906 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3907 with Python 2.3a2.
3908
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003909- os.path exposes getctime.
3910
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003911- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003912 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003913 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003914 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003915 unit tests of floating point results.
3916
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003917- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3918 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3919 has been increased.
3920
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003921- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3922 executed.
3923
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003924- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3925 postinstallation script.
3926
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003927- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3928 test the current module.
3929
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003930- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003931 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3932 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3933 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3934 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3935
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003936- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003937 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003938 Ward's Optik package.
3939
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003940- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3941 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3942 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3943 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3944
3945- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3946 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003947 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003948
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003949- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3950 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3951 shelf are binary pickles.
3952
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003953- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3954 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3955
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003956- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3957 modules are iterators now.
3958
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003959- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3960 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3961 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3962 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3963 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3964 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003965
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003966- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3967 with their entity value.
3968
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003969- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3970
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003971- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3972 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003973
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003974- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3975 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003976 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003977
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003978- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3979 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3980 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3981 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3982 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3983 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3984 main():
3985
3986 import locale
3987 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3988
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003989- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3990 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3991
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003992- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3993 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3994 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3995 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3996 to the new standard.
3997
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003998- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3999 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4000 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4001 an extension to the database.
4002
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004003- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4004 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4005 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4006 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004007 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004008
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004009- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004010 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004011
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004012- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4013 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4014 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4015 bounded integers.
4016
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004017- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4018 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4019 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4020 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4021 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4022 in existence.
4023
4024 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4025 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4026 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4027 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4028 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4029 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4030
4031 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4032 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4033 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4034 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4035
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004036- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4037 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4038 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4039
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004040- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4041
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004042- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4043 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4044 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4045 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4046
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004047- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4048 argument.
4049
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004050- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4051 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4052 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4053 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4054 [SF patch 560794].
4055
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004056- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4057 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4058 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004059 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4060 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4061 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004062
4063- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4064 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004065
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004066- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4067 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4068 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4069 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004070
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004071- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4072 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4073 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4074 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4075 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4076
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004077- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004078
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004079- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4080
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004081- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4082 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4083 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4084 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4085 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4086 identical to None.
4087
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004088- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4089 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4090 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4091 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4092 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4093 results now.
4094
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004095- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4096 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4097
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004098- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4099 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4100 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4101 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4102 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4103 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4104 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4105 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4106
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004107- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4108
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004109- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4110 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4111
4112- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4113 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4114 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4115 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4116 and other systems.
4117
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004118- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4119 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4120 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4121 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 +00004122 work well with these.
4123
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004124- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4125
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004126- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004127 connections.
4128
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004129- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4130 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4131 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4132
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004133- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4134 sets
4135
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004136- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4137 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4138 name.
4139
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004140- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4141 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4142 passed in.
4143
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004144- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004145 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004146 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4147 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004148
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004149- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4150
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004151- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4152
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004153- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4154 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4155 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4156
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004157- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4158 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4159 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4160 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004161 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004162
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004163- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004164 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004165 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004166
4167- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4168 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4169 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4170
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004171- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004172 the value of its expression argument.
4173
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004174- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4175 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4176 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4177
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004178- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4179 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4180 skipstone browser was included.
4181
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004182- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4183 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4184
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004185Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004187
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004188- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4189 names in addition to accepting file names.
4190
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004191- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4192 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4193 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4194 still used and useful.)
4195
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004196- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4197 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4198 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4199 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004200
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004201- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4202 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4203 the generated binary.
4204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004205Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004207
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004208- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4209
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004210- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4211 except in the hands of experts.
4212
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004213- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004214 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4215 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4216 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004217
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004218- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4219 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4220 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4221 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4222 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4223 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4224 builds.
4225
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004226- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4227 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4228 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4229 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4230 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4231 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4232 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4233 new type.
4234
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004235- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004236
4237 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4238 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4239 positive infinities.
4240
4241 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4242 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4243 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4244 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4245 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4246 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4247 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4248
4249 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4250
4251 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4252
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004253- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4254 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4255 size of the executable.
4256
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004257- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4258 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4259 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4260 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004261
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004262- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4263
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004264- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4265 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4266 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004267
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004268- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4269 well as Unix.
4270
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004271- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4272 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4273 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4274 modules in the README file for details.
4275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004276C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004278
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004279- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4280 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004281 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004282 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004283 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004284
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004285- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4286 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4287 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4288 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4289 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4290 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004291 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004292 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4293 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4294 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4295 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4296 aligned.)
4297
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004298- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4299 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4300 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4301
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004302- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4303 level.
4304
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004305- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4306 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4307 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4308 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4309 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4310
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004311- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4312 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4313 code.
4314
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004315- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4316 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4317 adjusting for negative indices.
4318
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004319- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4320 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4321 object.
4322
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004323- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4324 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4325 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4326
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004327- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4328 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004329
4330- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4331
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004332- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4333 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4334 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4335 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4336
4337- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4338
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004339- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004340
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004341- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004342 without going through the buffer API.
4343
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004345
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004346- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4347 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4348 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4349 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004351- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4352 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4353
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004354- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004355 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4356
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004357New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004359
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004360- OpenVMS is now supported.
4361
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004362- AtheOS is now supported.
4363
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004364- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4365
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004366- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4367
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004368Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
4370
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004371- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4372 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4373 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004374
4375Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004377
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004378- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4379 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4380 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4381 bugs.
4382 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004383 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004384 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4385 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004386 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004387
4388- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004389 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004390
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004391- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4392 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4393
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004394- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4395 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004396 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004397 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4398
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004399- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4400 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4401 use files" uninstall option).
4402
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004403- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4404
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004405- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4406 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4407
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004408- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4409 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4410 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4411
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004412- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4413 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4414 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4415 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4416 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004417 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4418 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4419 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004420
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004421- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004422 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004423 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4424 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4425 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4426 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4427 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4428 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4429 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4430 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4431 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4432 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4433 work around.
4434
4435- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4436 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4437 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4438 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4439 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4440 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4441 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4442 specified with O_CREAT too).
4443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004444Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445----
4446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004447- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004448
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004449- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4450 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4451 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4452
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004453- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4454 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4455 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4456
4457- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4458 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4459 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4460 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4461 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4462 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4463 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4464 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004465
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004466- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4467 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4468 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004470- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4471 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4472 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4473 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4474 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004475
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004476- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4477 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4478 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004479
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004480- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4481 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004482
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004483- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4484 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4485 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4486 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4487 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004488
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004489- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4490 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4491 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4492
4493- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4494 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4495 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004496
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004497- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4498 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4499 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4500 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004501 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004502
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004503- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4504 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004505
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004506- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4507 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004508
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004509- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004510 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004511 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4512 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004513
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004514
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004515What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004516===============================
4517
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4519
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004520Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004522
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004523- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4524 with a custom metaclass.
4525
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004526Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004528
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004529- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4530 are proxies.
4531
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004532Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004534
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004535- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4536 very short strings.
4537
4538- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4539 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4540 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4541 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4542 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4543
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004544Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004546
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004547- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4548 close or delete time).
4549
4550- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4551 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4552
4553- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4554
4555- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004556 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004557
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004558Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004560
4561Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004563
4564C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004566
4567New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004569
4570Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004572
4573Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004575
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004576- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4577
4578- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4579 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4580
4581- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4582 deleted at process exit time.
4583
4584- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4585 in backslash.
4586
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004587Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004590- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4591 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4592 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4593
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004594
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004595What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004596===========================
4597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4599
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004602
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004603- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4604 been extensively updated. See
4605
4606 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4607
4608 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4609
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004610- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4611 deleted!
4612
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004613- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4614 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4615 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4616 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4617 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4618
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004619- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4620
4621 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4622 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4623
4624 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4625 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4626 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4627 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4628 supported anyway.
4629
4630 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4631 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4632
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004633- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4634 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4635 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4636 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4637 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004638
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004639- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4640 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4641 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4642
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004643Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004645
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004646- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4647 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4648 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4649 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4650 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4651 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004652 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4653 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4654 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4655 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004656
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004657- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4658 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4659 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004661Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004663
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004664- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4665
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004668
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004669- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4670 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4671 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4672 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4673 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4674 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4675
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004676- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4677
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004678- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4679
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004680- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4681
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004682- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4683 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4684 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4685
4686- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4687
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004688Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004690
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004691- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4692 off a search on Google.
4693
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004694Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004696
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004697- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4698 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4699 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4700 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4701 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4702 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4703 other platforms should do likewise.
4704
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004705- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4706 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4707 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4708
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004709C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004711
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004712- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4713 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4714 producing key-value pairs.
4715
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004716- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004717 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004718 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4719 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4720 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4721 previously went unchallenged.
4722
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004723New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004725
4726Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004728
4729Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004731
4732Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004734
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004735- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4736 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004737
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004738- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4739 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4740 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4741 home.
4742
4743
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004744What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004745===========================
4746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4748
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004749Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004751
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004752- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4753 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004754
4755 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004756 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004757
4758 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4759 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004760 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004761 This needs to be documented.
4762
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004763- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4764 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4765
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004766- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4767 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4768 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4769
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004770- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4771 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4772
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004773- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4774 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4775 class forbids it).
4776
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004777- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4778 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4779 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4780
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004781- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4782
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004783Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004785
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004786- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4787 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004788 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004789
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004790- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4791 (like 1 + '').
4792
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004793Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004795
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004796- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4797 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4798 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4799 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004800 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004801 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4802
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004803- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4804 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4805 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4806 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4807
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004808- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4809 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004810 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4811 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4812 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004813
4814- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4815 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004816
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004817- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4818 bytes on its input.
4819
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004820Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004822
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004823- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004824 convenience function.
4825
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004826- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4827 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4828 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004829 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4830 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4831 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4832 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4833 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4834 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004835
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004836- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4837 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4838 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4839 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4840
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004841- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4842 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4843 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4844
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004845- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4846 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4847 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4848 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4849
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004850- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4851 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004853 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4854 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4855 new -l and -e options.
4856
4857- statcache is now deprecated.
4858
4859- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4860 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004862 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4863 time properly taken into account.
4864
4865- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4866 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4867 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4868 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4869
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004872
4873Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004875
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004876- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4877 is built with libdb3 if available.
4878
4879- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4880
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004881C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004883
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004884- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4885 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4886 PySequence_Size().
4887
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004888- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4889
4890- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4891 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4892 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4893
4894- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4895 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4896
4897- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4898 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4899
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004900New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004902
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004903- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4904 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4905
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004906- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4907 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4908
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004909- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004911Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004913
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004914- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4915 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4916
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004917Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004919
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004920Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004922
4923- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4924 removed completely in the next release.
4925
4926- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4927 OSX.
4928
4929- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4930 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4931
4932- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004935What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004936===========================
4937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4939
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004940Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004942
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004943- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004944 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004945 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004946 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4947 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004948 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4949 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004950 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4951 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004952
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004953- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4954 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4955
4956- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4957 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4958
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004959Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004961
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004962- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4963 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4964 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4965 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4966 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4967 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4968 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4969 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4970
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004971- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4972 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4973 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4974 example).
4975
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004976- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004977 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004978 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004979 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004980
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004981- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4982 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4983 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004984 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004985
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004986- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4987 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4988 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4989 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4990 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4991 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4992
4993 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4994
4995 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4996
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004997Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004999
5000- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5001
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005002- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5003
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005004- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5005 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005006
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005007- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5008 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5009 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5010 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5011 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5012 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005013 attributes.
5014
5015- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5016 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5017 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005018
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005019- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5020 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5021 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005022
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005023- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5024 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5025 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005026 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5027 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5028
5029- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5030 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005031
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005032Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005034
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005035- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5036 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5037
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005038- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5039 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5040 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5041 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5042
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005043- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5044 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5045 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5046 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5047
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005048 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5049 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5050 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5051 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5052 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5053 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5054 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5055 without losing information).
5056
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005057- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005058 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5059 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5060 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5061 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5062 module).
5063
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005064 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005065 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5066 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5067 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5068 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005069
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005070- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005071 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5072 encoding.
5073
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005074- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5075 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5076
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005078 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5079
5080- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5081 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5082 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5083 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5084
5085- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5086
5087- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5088 ON, and OFF.
5089
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005090- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5091 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5092
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005093Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005095
5096- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5097 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5098 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005099
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005100- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5101 been added: -X and -E.
5102
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005103Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005105
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005106- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5107 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5108
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005109C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005111
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005112- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5113 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5114 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5115 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5116 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5117
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005118- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5119 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5120 as long) arguments.
5121
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005122- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5123 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5124 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5125 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5126 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5127 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5128
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005129- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5130 input.
5131
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005132New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005134
5135Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005136-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005137
5138Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005139-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005140
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005141- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5142 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5143 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5144
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005145- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5146 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5147 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005148 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5151 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5152 import signal
5153 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005156 while 1:
5157 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005159 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5160 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5161 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5162 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005163
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005164
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005165What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5166===========================
5167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5169
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005170Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005172
5173- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5174 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5175 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5176
5177- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5178 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5179 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5180 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5181 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5182 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5183 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005184
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005185- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005186 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005187 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5188 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5189 associate a docstring with a property.
5190
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005191- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5192 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5193 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5194 other built-in object types.
5195
5196- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5197 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5198 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5199 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5200 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5201
5202- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5203 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5204
5205- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5206 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005207 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005208 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5209 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5210 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5211 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5212 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5213
5214- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5215 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5216 class.
5217
5218- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5219 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5220 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5221 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5222
5223- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5224 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5225 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5226 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5227
5228- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5229 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5230
5231- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5232 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5233 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5234 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5235 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005236 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005237 with the same value as s.
5238
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005239- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5240
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005241Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005243
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005244- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5245
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005246- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5247 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5248 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5249 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5250 objects.
5251
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005252- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5253 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005254 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5255 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5256
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005257- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5258 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5259 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5260
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005261Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005263
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005264- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5265 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5266 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5267 by the instances.
5268
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005269- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5270 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5271 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5272
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005273- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5274 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5275 before the entire comparison is complete.
5276
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005277- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5278 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5279 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5280
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005281- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5282 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5283 getwriter().
5284
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005285- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5286 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5287
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005288- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005289 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5290 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5291
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005292- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5293 iterable object.
5294
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005295- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5296 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005297
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005298- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5299 authentication.
5300
5301- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5302 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005303
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005304- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005305 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5306 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5307 a sample driver.)
5308
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005309Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005311
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005312- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5313 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5314 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5315 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5316 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5317 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5318 kernel has large file support.
5319
5320- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5321 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5322 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5323 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5324 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5325
5326- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5327 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5328 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5329
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005330C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005333- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5334 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5335
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005336New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005338
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005339- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5340 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5341
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005342Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005344
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005345- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5346 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5347 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5348 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5349 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5350
5351- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5352 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5353 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5354 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5355
5356- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5357 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5358
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005359Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005361
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005362- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005363 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5364 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005365
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005366
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005367What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5368===========================
5369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5371
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005372Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005374
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005375- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5376 big to represent as a C double.
5377
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005378- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5379 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5380 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5381 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5382 restriction).
5383
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005384- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5385 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5386 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5387 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5388 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5389
5390 >>> dir([])
5391 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5392 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5393 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5394 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5395 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5396 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5397 'reverse', 'sort']
5398
5399 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5400
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005401- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005402 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5403 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5404 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5405 OverflowError exception.
5406
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005407- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005408 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005409 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5410 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5411 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5412 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5413 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005414 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5416 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5417
5418 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5419 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5420 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5421 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005422
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005423- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005424 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5425 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5426 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5427 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5428 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5429 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5430 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5431 once it is created.
5432
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005433- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5434 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5435 (key, value) pairs.
5436
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005437- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005438 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5439 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5440
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005441- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5442 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5443 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5444 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5445 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005446
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005447- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005448 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5449 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5450
5451 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5452
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005453- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005454 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5455
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005456Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005458
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005459- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005460 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5461 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005462
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005463- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5464 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5465 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5466 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5467 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5468 in this area anymore).
5469
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005470- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5471 threading.Timer.
5472
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005473- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5474 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5475
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005476- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005477 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5478
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005479- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005480 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5481 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5482 converted to Python longs.
5483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005484- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005485 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5486
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005487- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5488 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5489 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5490
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005491Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005493
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005494- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5495 division operators as per PEP 238.
5496
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005497Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005499
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005500- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5501 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5502 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5503 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5504
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005505C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005507
5508- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005509
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005510- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5511 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005512 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005513
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005514 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5515 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005516 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005517 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005518
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005519- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005520 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5521 module:
5522
5523 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005524
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005525 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5526 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005527
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005528 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5529 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005530
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005531 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5532
5533 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5534
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005535- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005536 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5537 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5538 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005539
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005541-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005542
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005543- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5544 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5545 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5546 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5547 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005549Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005551
5552Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005553-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005554
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005555- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5556 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5557 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5558 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005559 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5560 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5561 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5562 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5563 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005564
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005565- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005566 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5567
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005568
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005569What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5570===========================
5571
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005572*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5573
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005574Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005575-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005576
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005577- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5578 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5579
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005580- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5581 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5582 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005583
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005584- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5585 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5586 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5587 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005588
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005589- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5590
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005592
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005593Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005594-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005595
5596- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005597 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005598 the module docstring for details.
5599
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005600Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005602
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005603- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005604 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5605 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5606 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005607
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005608- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5609 Nick Mathewson.
5610
5611Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005613
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005614- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5615 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5616 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5617 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5618 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5619 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5620 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5621 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5622
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005623- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5624 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5625 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5626 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5627
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005628- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5629 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5630 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5631 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5632 come a long way).
5633
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005634- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5635 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5636 write filters for these warnings).
5637
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005638- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5639 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5640 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5641 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5642 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5643
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005644- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5645 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5646 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5647 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5648 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5649 older distribution.
5650
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005651Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005652-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005653
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005654- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5655 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005656 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005657
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005658- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5659 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5660 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5661
5662- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5663
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005664- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5665
5666- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5667
5668- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005671
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005672- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5673
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005674New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005676
5677C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005679
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005680- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5681 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5682 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5683 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5684 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5685 against buffer overruns.
5686
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005687- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005688 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5689 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005690 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5691 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5692 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5693
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005694- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5695 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5696 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5697 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5698 deprecated.
5699
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005700Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005701-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005702
5703- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5704 relevant is found.
5705
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005706
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005707What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005708===========================
5709
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005710*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5711
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005712Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005713----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005714
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005715- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5716 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5717 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5718 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5719 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5720 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5721 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5722 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005723 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005724 repaired.
5725
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005726- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005727 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005728 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5729 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5730 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5731 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5732 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5733 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5734 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5735 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5736
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005737- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5738 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5739 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5740 leading BMO character).
5741
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005742- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5743 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5744 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5745
5746 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5747 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5748 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005749
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005750 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5751 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5752 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5753 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5754 for various simple to use conversions.
5755
5756 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5757 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5758
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5760 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5761 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5762 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5763 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5764 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5765 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5766 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5767 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5768 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5769 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5770 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5771 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5772 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5773 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005774
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005775- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5776 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5777 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005778 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005779 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005780
5781 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005782 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5783 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5784 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5785 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5786 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005787 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5788 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005789
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005790 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5791 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5792 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005793 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005794
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005795- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5796 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5797 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5798 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5799 floating arithmetic,
5800
5801 x = 9007199254740992.0
5802 print long(x)
5803
5804 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5805 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5806 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5807 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5808 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5809 functions are of good quality).
5810
5811 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5812 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5813 algorithms to break.
5814
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005815- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5816 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5817 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5818 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5819 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5820 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5821 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5822 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5823 order.
5824
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005825- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5826 operation along the most common code paths.
5827
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005828- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5829 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5830
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005831- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5832 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5833 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5834 {}.update(UserDict())
5835
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005836- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5837 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5838 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5839 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5840 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5841 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5842 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5843 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5844
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005845- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005846 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005848 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005849 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5850 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005851 join() method of strings
5852 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005853 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5854 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005855 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005856 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005857
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005858- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5859 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5860
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005861- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5862 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5863
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005864- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5865 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5866 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5867 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5868
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005869- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5870 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005871 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005872 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5873 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005874
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005875- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5876
5877
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005878Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005879-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005880
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005881- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005882 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005883 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5884 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5885
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005886- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5887 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5888
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005889- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5890 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5891 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5892 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5893
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005894- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5895 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5896 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5897
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005898- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5899
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005900- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5901
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005902- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5903 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5904 that are still imported into string.py).
5905
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005906- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5907
5908- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5909 Now it does.
5910
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005911- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5912
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005913- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5914 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5915 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5916 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5917 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005918 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5919 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005920
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005921- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5922 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5923 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5924 'help(object)'.
5925
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005926Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005927-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005928
5929- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005930 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005931 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5932 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5933
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005934- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005935 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5936 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005937
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005938C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005939-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005940
5941- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5942 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005943
5944----
5945
5946**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**