blob: 0826013ef6793d3772cdd168366591bb9775f16e [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 Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000015- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
16 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
17
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000018- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
19
20- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
21
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000022- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
23 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
24 was empty.
25
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000026- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
27 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
28
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000029- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
30present).
31
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000032- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
33 codes.
34
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000035- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
36 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
37 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
38
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000039- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
40 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
41
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000042- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000043 (fixes bug #1119418).
44
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000045- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
46
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000047- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
48 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
49
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000050- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
51 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
52 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
53
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000054- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
55
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000056- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
57 reference counts in some error exit cases.
58
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000059- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
60 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
61 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
62 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
63 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
64 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
65 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
66 realloc.
67
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000068- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
69 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
70
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000071- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
72 like their int counterparts.
73
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000074- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
75 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
76 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
77 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
78 for a longer write-up of the problem).
79
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000080- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
81 serializing floats.
82
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000083- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
84 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
85 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
86
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000087- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
88 278.
89
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000090- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
91 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
92 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
93 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000094 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000095 PyNumber_*().
96 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
97
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000098- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
99 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
100 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
101 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
102
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000103- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
104 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
105 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
106 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
107 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
108
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000109- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
110 disabled caused a crash.
111
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000112- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
113 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000116 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
117
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000118- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
119
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000120- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000121 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
122 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
123 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000124
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000125- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
126
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000127- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
128 returning None.
129
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000130- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000131 ('\') with a specific error message.
132
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000133- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
134
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000135- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
136 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
137
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000138- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000139 an ferror() call.
140
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000141- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
142 list.sort().
143
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000144- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
145 (2+3) --> (5).
146
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000147- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
148
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000149- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
150 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000151
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000152- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
153 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
154 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
155
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000156- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
157 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
158 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
159
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000160Extension Modules
161-----------------
162
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000163- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
164 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
165
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000166- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
167
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000168- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
169 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
170
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000171- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
172 returns in cStringIO.c.
173
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000174- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
175 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
176
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000177- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
178
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000179- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
180
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000181- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
182 the file system encoding.
183
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000184- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
185 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000186
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000187- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
188
189- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000190 line without newlines.
191
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000192- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
193 on Windows.
194
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000195- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
196 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
197
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000198- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
199 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
200 for large or negative values.
201
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000202- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000203 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000204
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000205- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
206
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000207- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
208 if available on the platform.
209
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000210- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
211 available on the platform.
212
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000213- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
214 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
215
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000216- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
217
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000218- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
219 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
220 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
221
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000222- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
223
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000224- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
225 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
226
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000227- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000228 file size.
229
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000230- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
231
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000232- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
233 {remove_history,replace_history}
234
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000235- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
236 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000237
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000238- stat_float_times is now True.
239
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000240- array.array objects are now picklable.
241
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000242- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
243 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
244
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000245- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
246 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
247 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
248
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000249- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
250 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000251
252Library
253-------
254
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000255- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
256 "parent" argument.
257
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000258- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
259 for padding.
260
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000261- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
262 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
263
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000264- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
265 to get the correct encoding.
266
267- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
268 languages.
269
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000270- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
271
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000272- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
273
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000274- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
275
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000276- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
277 functionality.
278
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000279- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
280
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000281- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
282 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
283
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000284- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
285 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
286 match the Content-Length header.
287
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000288- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
289
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000290- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
291 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
292 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
293
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000294- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
295
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000296- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
297
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000298- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
299 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
300
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000301- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
302 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
303 Tkdnd.
304
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000305- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
306 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
307
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000308- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
309 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
310
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000311- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000312 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
313
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000314- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
315 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
316
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000317- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
318 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
319
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000320- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000321 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000322
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000323- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
324
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000325- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
326 error messages.
327
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000328- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
329
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000330- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
331 Bug #1224621.
332
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000333- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
334 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
335 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
336 terminates by raising StopIteration.
337
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000338- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
339
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000340- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
341 component of the path.
342
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000343- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
344 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
345 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
346 class at all.
347
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000348- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
349 files to PyPI.
350
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000351- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
352 them to PyPI.
353
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000354- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
355 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
356 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
357 work as expected.
358
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000359- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
360 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
361
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000362- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000363 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
364
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000365- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
366
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000367- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
368 to build.
369
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000370- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
371 symbolic links on Windows.
372
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000373- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000374 profile.py if available.
375
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000376- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
377
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000378- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
379 in LWPCookieJar.
380
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000381- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
382
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000383- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
384
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000385- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
386
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000387- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
388
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000389- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
390
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000391- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
392
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000393- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
394
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000395- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
396
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000397- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
398 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
399 be exploited in various ways.
400
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000401- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
402
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000403- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
404
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000405- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
406
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000407- Enhancements to the csv module:
408
409 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000410 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000411 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000412 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
413 reporting.
414 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
415 dictates.
416 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000417 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000418 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000419 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
420 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000421 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
422 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000423 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000424 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
425 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
426 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
427 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
428 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
429 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
430 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
431 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
432 without first creating a dialect class.
433 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
434 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
435 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000436 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000437 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
438 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000439 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
440 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
441 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
442 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000443 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
444 This has been fixed.
445
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000446- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
447 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
448 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
449 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
450
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000451- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
452
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000453- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
454 (Bug #951915).
455
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000456- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
457 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
458 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000459 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000460
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000461- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
462
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000463- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
464 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
465
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000466- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
467
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000468- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
469
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000470- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
471
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000472- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
473
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000474- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
475
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000476- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
477 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
478 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
479
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000480- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000481 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000482
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000483- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
484 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
485 tokenizer with very long source lines.
486
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000487- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
488 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
489
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000490- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
491 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000492
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000493- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
494 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
495
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000496- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
497 correctly.
498
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000499- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
500 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
501 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
502 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
503 between two lines.
504
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000505- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
506 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
507 handlers.
508
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000509- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000510 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
511 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000512
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000513- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
514 considering it exactly like a '*'.
515
516
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000517Build
518-----
519
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000520- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
521 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
522
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000523- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
524 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
525
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000526- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
527 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
528 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000529 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000530
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000531- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
532 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
533 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
534
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000535- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
536
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000537- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
538 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
539
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000540- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
541 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
542 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
543 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
544 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
545 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
546 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
547 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
548
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000549- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
550 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
551 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
552 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
553
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000554
555C API
556-----
557
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000558- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
559
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000560- Removed PyRange_New().
561
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000562
563Tests
564-----
565
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000566- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000567
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000568
569Documentation
570-------------
571
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000572- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
573
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000574- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
575
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000576- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
577
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000578- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
579
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000580- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
581
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000582- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
583
584- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
585
586- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
587
588- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
589
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000590- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
591 Closes bug #1166582.
592
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000593- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
594 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
595 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
596
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000597Mac
598---
599
600
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000601New platforms
602-------------
603
604- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
605
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000606
607Tools/Demos
608-----------
609
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000610- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
611 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
612 source files that need an encoding declaration.
613 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
614
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000615- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
616
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000617- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000618
619
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000620What's New in Python 2.4 final?
621===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000622
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000623*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000624
625Core and builtins
626-----------------
627
628- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
629 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
630 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
631
632
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000633What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
634==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000635
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000636*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000637
638Core and builtins
639-----------------
640
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000641- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
642 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
643 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
644
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000645
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000646Library
647-------
648
649- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
650 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
651 raised is re-raised.
652
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000653- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
654 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
655
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000656- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
657 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
658 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
659 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
660 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
661 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
662 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
663 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
664 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
665 by the slice are recomputed now.
666
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000667- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000668
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000669Build
670-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000671
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000672- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
673 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
674 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000675
676C API
677-----
678
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000679- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
680
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000681
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000682What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
683================================
684
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000685*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000686
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000687License
688-------
689
690The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
691is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
692changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
693Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
694intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
695durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
696the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
697License::
698
699 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
700
701says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
702to Python 2.1.1.
703
704The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
705License Version 2.
706
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000707Core and builtins
708-----------------
709
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000710- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
711 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
712 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
713 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
714 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
715 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
716 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
717 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
718 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
719 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
720
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000721- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000722
723Extension Modules
724-----------------
725
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000726- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
727 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
728 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
729 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000730
731Library
732-------
733
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000734- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
735 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
736 returned.
737
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000738- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
739
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000740- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
741 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
742
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000743- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
744
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000745- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
746 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000747
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000748- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
749
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000750- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
751
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000752- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000753 the source code is updated and reloaded.
754
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000755Build
756-----
757
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000758- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000759
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000760What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
761================================
762
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000763*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000764
765Core and builtins
766-----------------
767
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000768- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000769 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
770
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000771- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
772 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
773 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
774 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
775
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000776- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
777 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
778
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000779- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
780 constant.
781
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000782- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
783 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
784 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
785 large), and to anomalies such as
786 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
787 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
788 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
789 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000790
791Extension modules
792-----------------
793
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000794- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
795 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000796 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
797 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
798 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000799
800Library
801-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000802
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000803- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000804 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000805 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
806 --swig-cpp.
807
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000808- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
809 it is set.
810
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000811- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000812
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000813- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
814 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
815 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
816 Closes bug #1039270.
817
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000818- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000819
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000820 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000821 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
822 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
823 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
824 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
825 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
826 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
827 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
828 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
829 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
830 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
831 + Updates to documentation.
832
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000833- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
834 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
835 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
836 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
837
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000838- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000839
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000840- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
841 applications should use the getmember function.
842
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000843- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
844
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000845- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
846 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
847 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
848 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
849 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
850 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
851 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
852 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
853 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
854
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000855- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
856 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000857 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000858
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000859- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
860 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
861 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
862 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
863 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
864 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
865 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
866 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000867
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000868- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
869 the new public features (of which there are many).
870
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000871- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000872 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
873 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
874 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
875 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000876 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000877
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000878- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
879
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000880- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
881 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
882 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
883 options.
884
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000885- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
886 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
887 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
888 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
889 conditions under which non-string values work.
890
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000891Build
892-----
893
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000894- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
895 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
896 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
897
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000898- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
899 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
900 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
901 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
902 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000903
904C API
905-----
906
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000907- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
908 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
909
910- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
911
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000912- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
913 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
914 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
915 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
916 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
917 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
918 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
919 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
920 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
921
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000922- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
923
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000924- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
925 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
926 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000927
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000928Tests
929-----
930
931- test__locale ported to unittest
932
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000933Mac
934---
935
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000936- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
937 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
938 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000939
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000940Tools/Demos
941-----------
942
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000943- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
944 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
945 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
946 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
947 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000948
949
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000950What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
951=================================
952
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000953*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000954
955Core and builtins
956-----------------
957
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000958- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000959 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
960
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000961- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
962 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
963 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
964 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
965 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
966 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
967 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
968 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000969 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
970 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
971 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
972 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
973 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000974
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000975- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
976 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
977 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
978 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
979 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
980
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000981- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
982
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000983- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
984 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
985
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000986- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
987 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
988 modified the list.
989
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000990- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
991 functions is now writable.
992
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000993- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
994 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
995 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
996 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
997
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000998- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
999 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1000 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1001 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1002 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001003
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001004- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1005 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1006
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001007Extension modules
1008-----------------
1009
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001010- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1011
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001012- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1013 data.
1014
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001015- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1016 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1017 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1018 supposed to have been truncated away.
1019
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001020- Added socket.socketpair().
1021
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001022- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1023 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1024
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001025- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001026 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1027
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001028Library
1029-------
1030
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001031- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001032 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001033
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001034- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1035 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1036
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001037- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1038 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1039
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001040- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1041
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001042- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1043 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001044
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001045- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1046 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1047
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001048- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1049
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001050- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1051
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001052- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1053
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001054- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1055 Percivall.
1056
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001057- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1058 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1059
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001060- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1061 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1062 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001063 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001064
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001065- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1066 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1067 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1068 and exponent.
1069
1070- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1071
1072- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001073 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001074 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1075
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001076- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1077 to the readline module.
1078
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001079- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001080 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1081 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001082
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001083- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1084 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1085 contains symlinks.
1086
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001087- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1088 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1089
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001090- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1091 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1092 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1093
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001094- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1095 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1096 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1097 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1098 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1099 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1100 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1101 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1102 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1103 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1104 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1105 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1106 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1107
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001108- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1109
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001110Tools/Demos
1111-----------
1112
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001113- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1114 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1115
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001116- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1117
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001118Build
1119-----
1120
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001121- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1122 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1123 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1124 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1125 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1126 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1127 plans to do so.
1128
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001129- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1130 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1131
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001132- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1133 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1134
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001135- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1136 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1137
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001138- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1139 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1140
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001141- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1142 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1143
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001144C API
1145-----
1146
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001147..
1148
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001149Documentation
1150-------------
1151
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001152- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1153 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1154
1155- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1156 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1157 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001158
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001159New platforms
1160-------------
1161
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001162- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1163
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001164Tests
1165-----
1166
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001167..
1168
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001169Windows
1170-------
1171
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001172- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1173 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1174 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1175 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1176 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1177 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1178 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1179 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1180 the problem.
1181
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001182Mac
1183---
1184
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001185..
1186
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001187
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001188What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1189=================================
1190
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001191*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001192
1193Core and builtins
1194-----------------
1195
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001196- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1197 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1198 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1199 sensitive code.
1200
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001201- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001202 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001203
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001204 @staticmethod
1205 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001206
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001207 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001208
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001209- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1210 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1211 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1212 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1213 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1214 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1215 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1216 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1217 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1218 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1219 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1220
1221 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1222 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1223 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1224 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1225 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1226 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1227 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1228
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001229- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1230 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1231
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001232- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001233 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001234
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001235- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001236 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001237 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1238
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001239- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001240 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1241 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1242
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001243- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1244 types that support garbage collection.
1245
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001246- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1247
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001248- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1249 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1250 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1251 Jython.
1252
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001253- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1254
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001255- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1256 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1257
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001258- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1259 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1260 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001261
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001262- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1263 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1264 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1265
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001266Extension modules
1267-----------------
1268
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001269- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1270
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001271Library
1272-------
1273
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001274- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1275 TIS-620
1276
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001277- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1278 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1279 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1280 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1281 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1282 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1283 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1284 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1285 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1286 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1287
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001288- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1289
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001290- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1291 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1292 same as when the argument is omitted).
1293 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1294
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001295- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1296
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001297- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1298 schemes are offered.
1299
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001300- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1301
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001302- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1303 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1304 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1305
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001306- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1307
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001308- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1309 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1310
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001311- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1312 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1313 when dummy_threading is being used.
1314
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001315- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1316 from a tarfile.
1317
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001318- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001319 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001320
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001321- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1322 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1323 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1324 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1325
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001326- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1327 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1328
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001329- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1330 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1331 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1332 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1333 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1334 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1335 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1336 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1337 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1338 by some other method in progress).
1339
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001340- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1341 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1342 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001343
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001344- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1345
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001346- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1347 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1348 AM Kuchling.
1349
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001350- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1351 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1352 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1353
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001354- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1355 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1356 instead of unsigned.
1357
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001358- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001359 no longer part of the public API.
1360
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001361- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1362 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1363 string methods of the same name).
1364
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001365- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001366 SF patch 945642.
1367
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001368- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1369
1370 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1371
1372 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1373 DocTestSuites.
1374
1375- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1376 that provide thread-local data.
1377
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001378- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1379 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1380
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001381- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1382
1383- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1384 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1385 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1386
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001387- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1388
1389 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1390 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1391 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001392
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001393 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1394 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1395 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1396 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1397
1398 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1399 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1400
1401 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1402 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1403 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1404 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1405
1406 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1407 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1408 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1409 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1410 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1411
1412 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1413 wrapping help output.
1414
1415 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1416 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1417 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001418
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001419C API
1420-----
1421
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001422- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1423 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1424 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1425 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1426 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1427 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1428 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1429 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1430 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1431 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1432 its visible semantics have not changed.
1433
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001434- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1435 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1436
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001437Documentation
1438-------------
1439
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001440- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001441
1442 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001443 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001444
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001445 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001446
1447 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1448
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001449- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001450
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001451Tests
1452-----
1453
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001454- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001455 platforms that use the Makefile.
1456
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001457- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1458 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1459 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1460
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001461
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001462What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1463=================================
1464
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001465*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001466
1467Core and builtins
1468-----------------
1469
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001470- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1471 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1472 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1473 objects now (one object instead of three).
1474
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001475- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1476 Windows DLLs.
1477
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001478- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1479 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001480
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001481- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1482 a new .pyc magic.
1483
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001484- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1485 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1486 be there.
1487
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001488- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1489 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1490 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1491
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001492- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1493 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1494 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1495
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001496- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1497
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001498- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1499 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1500 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001501
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001502- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1503 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1504
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001505- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1506
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001507- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001508 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001509
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001510- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1511
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001512- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1513
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001514- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1515 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1516
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001517- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1518 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1519 Fixes bug #858016 .
1520
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001521- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1522 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1523 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1524
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001525- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1526 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1527 improves their performance (about 35%).
1528
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001529- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1530 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1531 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1532
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001533- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1534 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1535 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1536 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1537
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001538- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1539 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001540 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001541 length is not known).
1542
1543- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1544 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001545 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1546 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001547 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1548
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001549- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1550 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1551
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001552- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1553 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1554 keyword arguments.
1555
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001556- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1557 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1558 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1559
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001560- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1561 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1562 cases.
1563
1564- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1565 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1566 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1567 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1568 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1569 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1570 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1571 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1572 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1573 a release build.
1574
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001575- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1576 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1577
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001578- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001579 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001580
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001581- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1582 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1583 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1584 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1585 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1586 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1587 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1588 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1589 destroyed.
1590
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001591- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1592 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1593 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1594 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1595 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1596 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1597 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1598 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1599
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001600- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1601 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1602 character other than a space.
1603
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001604- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1605 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1606 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1607 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1608 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1609 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1610 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1611 attributes with the same name.
1612
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001613- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1614 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1615 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1616 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1617 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1618 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1619 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1620 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1621 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1622 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1623 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1624 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1625 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1626 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001627
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001628- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1629 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1630 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1631 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1632 This has been repaired.
1633
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001634- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1635
1636- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1637
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001638- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1639 over a sequence.
1640
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001641- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001642 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001643
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001644- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1645
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001646- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1647 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1648 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1649 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1650 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1651 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1652 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1653 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1654
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001655- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1656 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1657 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1658
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001659- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1660 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1661 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1662 freelist.
1663
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001664- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1665 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1666
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001667- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1668 number.
1669
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001670- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1671 a TypeError exception.
1672
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001673- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1674 820195.
1675
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001676- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1677 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1678 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1679
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001680- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001681 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1682 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001683
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001684- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1685 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1686 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1687
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001688- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1689 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001690 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001691
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001692- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001693 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1694 the first call.
1695
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001696
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001697Extension modules
1698-----------------
1699
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001700- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1701 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1702
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001703- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1704 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1705 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1706 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1707 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1708 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1709 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001710
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001711- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1712
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001713- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1714
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001715- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1716 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1717
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001718- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1719 fewer false positives.
1720
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001721- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1722 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1723
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001724- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001725 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1726
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001727- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001728 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001729 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001730 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1731 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001732
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001733- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1734 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1735 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1736 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1737
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001738- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1739 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1740 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1741 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1742 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1743 #897625.
1744
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001745- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1746 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1747
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001748- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1749 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1750 and pops on either side of the deque.
1751
1752- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1753 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1754
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001755- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1756 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1757 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1758 other functions that expect a function argument.
1759
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001760- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1761
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001762- os.getsid was added.
1763
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001764- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1765 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1766 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1767
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001768- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1769
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001770- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1771
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001772- readline.clear_history was added.
1773
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001774- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1775
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001776- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1777
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001778- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1779
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001780- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1781
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001782- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1783
1784- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1785
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001786- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1787
1788- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1789
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001790- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1791 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1792 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1793
1794- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1795 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1796 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1797 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1798 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1799 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1800 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1801
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001802- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1803 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1804 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1805 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001806
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001807- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001808 iterators from a single iterable.
1809
1810- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1811 of raising a TypeError exception.
1812
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001813- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1814 as parameter.
1815
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001816Library
1817-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001818
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001819- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1820
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001821- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1822 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1823 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001824
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001825- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1826 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1827 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001828
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001829- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001830
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001831- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1832 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001833
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001834- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1835 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1836
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001837- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1838
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001839- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001840 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001841
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001842- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001843 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001844
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001845- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1846
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001847- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1848 on cygwin and mingw32.
1849
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001850- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1851
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001852- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1853 module.
1854
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001855- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1856 installation scheme for all platforms.
1857
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001858- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001859 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001860
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001861- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1862 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1863 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1864
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001865- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1866 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1867 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1868
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001869- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1870
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001871- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1872
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001873- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1874 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1875
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001876- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1877 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1878 type pattern with the same value exists.
1879
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001880- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1881 when run from the command prompt).
1882
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001883- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1884 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1885
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001886- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1887 default sort).
1888
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001889- Added global runctx function to profile module
1890
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001891- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1892
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001893- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1894
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001895- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1896
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001897- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001898 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1899 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1900 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1901 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1902 accordingly.
1903
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001904- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1905 decoding standards.
1906
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001907- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1908 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1909 called for all requests.
1910
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001911- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1912 they are passed to the compiler.
1913
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001914- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1915 indent, width and depth.
1916
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001917- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1918 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1919
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001920- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1921 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1922
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001923- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1924
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001925- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1926
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001927- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1928
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001929- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1930 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1931
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001932- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001933 for better performance.
1934
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001935- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001936
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001937- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1938 a string).
1939
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001940- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1941
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001942- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1943
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001944- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1945
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001946- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1947
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001948- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1949 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1950 list of fieldnames.
1951
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001952- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1953 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1954
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001955- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1956
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001957- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1958 empty lists.
1959
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001960- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1961 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1962 and shelves.
1963
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001964- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1965 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1966
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001967- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001968 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1969 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001970
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001971- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1972 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001973 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001974
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001975- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001976 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1977 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1978
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001979- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1980 and removed in Py2.4.
1981
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001982- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1983
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001984- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1985
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001986Tools/Demos
1987-----------
1988
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001989- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1990 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1991
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001992- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1993
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001994- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1995 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1996 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1997 destination in situations where both files are given.
1998
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001999- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2000 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2001 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2002 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2003
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002004- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2005
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002006- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2007 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2008 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2009 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2010 now.
2011
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002012- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2013 in effect
2014
2015- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2016 C-c C-h
2017
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002018- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2019 -d option was given.
2020
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002021Build
2022-----
2023
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002024- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2025 build under OS X.
2026
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002027- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2028 --enable-profiling.
2029
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002030- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2031 is configured --with-tsc.
2032
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002033- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2034 on AMD64.
2035
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002036- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2037 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2038
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002039- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2040 removed.
2041
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002042- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2043 supported (see PEP 11).
2044
2045- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2046
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002047- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2048
2049- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2050 (see PEP 11).
2051
2052- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2053 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2054
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002055C API
2056-----
2057
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002058- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2059 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2060 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2061
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002062- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2063 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2064 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2065 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2066
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002067- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2068 generator objects.
2069
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002070- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2071 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002072 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2073 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002074
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002075- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2076 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2077
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002078- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2079 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2080 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2081 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2082 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2083
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002084- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2085 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2086 about 10% faster.
2087
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002088- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2089 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2090
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002091- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2092 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2093 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2094 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2095
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002096Windows
2097-------
2098
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002099- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2100 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2101 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2102 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2103
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002104- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2105 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2106 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2107
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002108
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002109What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2110===============================
2111
2112*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2113
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002114IDLE
2115----
2116
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002117- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2118 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2119 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2120 context-menu actions.
2121
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002122- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2123 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2124 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2125 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2126 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2127 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2128 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2129 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2130 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2131
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002132
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002133What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2134=============================================
2135
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002136*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002137
2138Core and builtins
2139-----------------
2140
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002141- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002142 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002143 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2144
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002145Extension modules
2146-----------------
2147
2148- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2149 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2150 than once. This has been fixed.
2151
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002152- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2153 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2154 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2155 call.
2156
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002157- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2158
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002159Library
2160-------
2161
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002162- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2163 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2164
2165- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2166 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2167 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2168 restored.
2169
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002170IDLE
2171----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002172
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002173- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002174
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002175Build
2176-----
2177
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002178- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2179 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2180
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002181C API
2182-----
2183
2184Windows
2185-------
2186
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002187- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2188 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2189
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002190- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2191
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002192Mac
2193---
2194
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002195- Various fixes to pimp.
2196
2197- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2198
2199- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2200 more problems than it solves.
2201
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002202
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2204=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002205
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002206*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2207
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002208Core and builtins
2209-----------------
2210
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002211- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2212 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002214- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2215 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002216 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002217
2218- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2219 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2220 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002221 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002222
2223- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2224 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002225
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002226- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2227 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2228 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2229
2230- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002231 770247.
2232
2233- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002234
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002235Extension modules
2236-----------------
2237
2238- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2239 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2240
2241- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2242
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002243- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2244
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002245- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2246 contained within the _strptime module.
2247
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002248- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2249 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2250
2251- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002252 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2253
2254- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2255 the find_class attribute, if present.
2256
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002257- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002258
2259 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2260 (SF bug 763298).
2261
2262 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002263 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2264 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2265 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002266
2267 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2268
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002269Library
2270-------
2271
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002272- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2273
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002274- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2275 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2276 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2277 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2278 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2279 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2280 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2281 or Tester().
2282
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002283- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2284 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2285 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2286 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2287 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2288 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2289 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2290 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2291 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002292
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002293 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002294
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002295- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2296 weren't before was an oversight.
2297
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002298- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2299 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2300
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002301- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2302 when there are no lines.
2303
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002304- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2305 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2306
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002307- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2308 to child processes.
2309
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002310- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2311
2312- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2313
2314- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2315 xmlrpclib.
2316
2317- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2318 responses.
2319
2320- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2321 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2322
2323- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2324 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2325 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2326
2327- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2328 used as patterns.
2329
2330- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2331 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2332 than Tk 8.3.
2333
2334- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2335
2336- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002337
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002338Tools/Demos
2339-----------
2340
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002341- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2342
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002343- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002345- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002346
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002347Build
2348-----
2349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002350- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2351
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002352- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2353
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002354- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2355 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002356
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002357- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2358 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2359 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002361C API
2362-----
2363
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002364- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2365 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2366
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002367Windows
2368-------
2369
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002370- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2371 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2372 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2373 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2374 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2375 Python exception ::
2376
2377 thread.error: can't start new thread
2378
2379 is raised now.
2380
2381- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2382 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2383 instead of from DLL teardown.
2384
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002385Mac
2386---
2387
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002388- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002389 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002390 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2391 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2392 the executable in the bundle.
2393
2394- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002395
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002396- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2397
2398- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2399 on Panther.
2400
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002401What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2402================================
2403
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002404*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002405
2406Core and builtins
2407-----------------
2408
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002409- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2410 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2411 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2412 with the -i option.
2413
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002414- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2415 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2416
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002417- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2418 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2419
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002420- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2421 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2422 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2423 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2424 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2425 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2426 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2427 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2428 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2429 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2430 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2431 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2432 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002433
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002434- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2435 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2436 embedded in a lambda expression.
2437
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002438- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2439 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2440 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2441 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2442 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2443
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002444- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2445 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2446 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2447
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002448- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2449 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2450
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002451- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2452 It's writable again.
2453
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002454- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2455 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2456 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002457 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002458
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002459- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2460 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2461 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2462
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002463Extension modules
2464-----------------
2465
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002466- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2467 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2468
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002469- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2470 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2471 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2472 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2473
2474- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2475 collection.
2476
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002477- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2478 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2479 unique within a single program run.
2480
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002481- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2482 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2483
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002484- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2485 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2486
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002487- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2488 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002489
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002490- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2491
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002492- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2493 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2494
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002495- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2496 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2497 for many BSD-derived systems.
2498
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002499
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002500Library
2501-------
2502
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002503- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2504 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2505 primary ones:
2506
2507 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2508 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2509 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2510
2511 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2512 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2513 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2514 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2515 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2516 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2517
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002518- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2519 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2520 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2521 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2522 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2523 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2524 argument.
2525
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002526- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2527 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2528 in the archive.
2529
2530- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2531 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2532
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002533- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2534 569574).
2535
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002536- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2537 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2538 no more.
2539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002540- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2541 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2542 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2543 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2544 code coverage.
2545
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002546- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2547 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2548 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002549 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2550 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002551
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002552- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2553 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2554 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002555 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002556
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002557- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2558
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002559- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2560 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2561 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2562 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2563
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002564- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2565 handling.
2566
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002567- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2568 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2569
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002570- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2571 in socket.py.
2572
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002573- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2574
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002575- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2576 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2577 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2578 opener with proxy support.
2579
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002580- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2581
2582- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2583
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002584Tools/Demos
2585-----------
2586
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002587- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2588
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002589- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2590
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002591- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2592 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002593
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002594- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2595 files.
2596
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002597Build
2598-----
2599
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002600- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002601 different root directory.
2602
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002603C API
2604-----
2605
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002606- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2607 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2608 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2609 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2610 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2611 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2612 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2613 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2614 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2615 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2616
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002617- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2618 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2619 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2620 from Python.
2621
2622
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002623New platforms
2624-------------
2625
2626None this time.
2627
2628Tests
2629-----
2630
2631- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2632 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2633
2634Windows
2635-------
2636
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002637- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2638
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002639- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2640 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2641 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2642 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2643 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2644 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2645 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2646 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2647 that's what it's for.
2648
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002649Mac
2650---
2651
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002652- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2653 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2654 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2655 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002656- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2657 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2658- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002659
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002660SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2661------------------------------------
2662
2663430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2664598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2665622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2666661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2667683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2668697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2669713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2670724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2671727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2672729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2673730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2674731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2675732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2676733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2677735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2678740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2679744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2680745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2681747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2682749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2683751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2684753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2685755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2686757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2687760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2688
2689
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002690What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2691================================
2692
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002693*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002694
2695Core and builtins
2696-----------------
2697
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002698- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2699 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2700
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002701- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2702 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2703 and cannot be strings).
2704
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002705- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2706 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2707 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2708 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2709
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002710- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2711 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2712 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2713 Python itself.
2714
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002715- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2716 the referenced object, if it has one.
2717
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002718- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2719 the thread started at
2720 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2721
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002722- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2723 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2724 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2725 placed on a list index.
2726
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002727- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2728 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2729 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2730 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2731
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002732- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2733 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2734 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2735 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2736 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2737 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2738 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2739
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002740- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2741 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2742 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2743 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2744 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2745
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002746- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2747 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002748
2749- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2750 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2751 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2752 #693195.)
2753
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002754- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2755 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002757- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002758 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002759 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2760 interpreter executions, would fail.
2761
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002762- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002763 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002764 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002765
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002766Extension modules
2767-----------------
2768
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002769- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2770 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2771 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2772 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2773
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002774- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2775 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2776
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002777- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2778 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2779 and Greg Chapman.)
2780
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002781- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2782 recursively.
2783
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002784- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002785 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2786 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2787 leaks.
2788
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002789- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2790
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002791- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2792 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2793 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2794 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2795 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2796 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2797 #705836.
2798
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002799- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002800 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2801
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002802- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2803 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2804 See SF bug #692416.
2805
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002806- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2807 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2808
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002809- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2810 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2811 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002812
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002813- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002814 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2815 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2816
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002817- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2818 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2819 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2820 timeouts to work properly.
2821
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002822Library
2823-------
2824
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002825- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2826 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2827 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2828 future release.
2829
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002830- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2831 for querying platform dependent features.
2832
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002833- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002834
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002835- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2836 pickle protocol versions.
2837
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002838- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2839 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2840 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2841
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002842- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2843
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002844- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2845 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2846 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2847 modules.
2848
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002849- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2850 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2851 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2852
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002853- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2854 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2855
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002856- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2857 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2858 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2859
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002860- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002861 MS Office extensions.
2862
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002863- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2864 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2865
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002866- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2867 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2868
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002869- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2870 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2871 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2872 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2873 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2874 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2875
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002876- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2877 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2878 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002879
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002880- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2881 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2882 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2883
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002884- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2885
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002886- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2887 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2888 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2889
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002890Tools/Demos
2891-----------
2892
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002893- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2894 See the module docstring for details.
2895
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002896Build
2897-----
2898
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002899- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2900 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002901
2902C API
2903-----
2904
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002905- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2906
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002907- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2908 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2909 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2910
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002911- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2912 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002913
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002914 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2915 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2916 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002917
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002918- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002919 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2920
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002921- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2922 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2923 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002924
2925New platforms
2926-------------
2927
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002928None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002929
2930Tests
2931-----
2932
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002933- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2934 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002935
2936Windows
2937-------
2938
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002939- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2940 function.
2941
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002942- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2943 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002944
2945Mac
2946---
2947
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002948- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2949 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002950
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002951- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2952 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002953
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002954- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2955 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2956 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002957
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002958- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002959 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2960 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002961
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002962- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2963 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002964
2965
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002966What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2967=================================
2968
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002969*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002970
2971Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002972-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002973
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002974- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2975 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2976 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2977
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002978- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2979 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2980 (SF patch #664376.)
2981
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002982- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2983 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2984 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2985 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2986 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2987 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002988 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002989
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002990- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2991 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2992 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2993 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002994 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002995
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002996- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2997 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2998 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2999 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3000 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3001 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3002 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3003 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3004 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3005 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3006 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3007
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003008- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3009 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3010 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3011 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3012 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3013 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3014
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003015- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3016 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3017
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003018- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3019 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3020 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3021 case.)
3022
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003023- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3024 passed as unicode strings.
3025
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003026- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3027 See SF bug #683467.
3028
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003029- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3030 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3031
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003032- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3033
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003034- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3035
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003036- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3037 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3038 arguments.
3039
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003040- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3041 See SF bug #667147.
3042
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003043- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003044 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003045 See SF bug #676155.
3046
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003047- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003048 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003049 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3050 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3051 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3052 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3053 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3054 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003055
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003056Extension modules
3057-----------------
3058
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003059- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3060 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3061 tp_as_number pointer.
3062
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003063- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3064 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3065 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3066 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3067 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3068
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003069- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3070
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003071- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3072
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003073- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003074 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003075 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3076 patch #678531.)
3077
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003078- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3079 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3080
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003081- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3082 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3083
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003084- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3085
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003086- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3087 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3088 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3089
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003090- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3091
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003092- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3093 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3094
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003095- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003096
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003097- datetime changes:
3098
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003099 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3100
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003101 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3102 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3103 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3104 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3105 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3106 now.
3107
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003108 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003109 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3110 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003111
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003112 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003113 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003114 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3115 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3116 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3117 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003118
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003119 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3120 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3121 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003122 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3123
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003124 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3125 by a later example coded by Guido.
3126
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003127 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003128 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3129 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3130 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003131 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3132 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3133
3134 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3135 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3136 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3137 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3138 tzinfo subclass instance.
3139
3140 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3141 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3142 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3143 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3144 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3145 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3146 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3147 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003148
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003149 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3150 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3151 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3152 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3153 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003154 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3155
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003156 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003157
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003158 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3159 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3160 as a naive datetime object.
3161
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003162 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3163 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3164 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3165
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003166 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3167 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3168 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3169 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3170 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3171 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3172 comparison.
3173
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003174 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3175 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3176 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3177 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003178 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003179
3180 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003181
3182 and ::
3183
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003184 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3185
3186 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3187 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3188 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3189 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3190
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003191 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3192 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3193 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3194 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3195 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3196
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003197 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3198 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003199 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3200 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003201
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003202Library
3203-------
3204
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003205- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3206 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3207
3208- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3209 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3210 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3211 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3212 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3213 See PEP 307 for details.
3214
3215- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3216 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3217
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003218- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3219 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003220 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003221 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3222 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003223 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003224
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003225- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3226 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3227
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003228- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3229 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3230 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3231
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003232- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3233
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003234- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3235 exception.
3236
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003237- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3238 class.
3239
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003240- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3241 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3242 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3243
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003244- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3245 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3246
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003247- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003248 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3249 See SF bug #659228.
3250
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003251- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3252 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3253 See SF patch #651082.
3254
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003255- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003256
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003257- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3258 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3259
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003260- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003261 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003262
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003263- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3264 DOS paths from other platforms.
3265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003266Tools/Demos
3267-----------
3268
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003269- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3270 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3271 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3272 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3273 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3274 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3275 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3276 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3277 example:
3278
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003279 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3280 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003281
3282 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3283
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003285Build
3286-----
3287
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003288- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3289 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3290 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003291 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3292
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003293 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3294
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003295- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3296 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3297 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3298 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3299 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3300 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3301 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3302 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3303 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3304
3305- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3306 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3307 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3308 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3309
3310- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3311 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3312
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003313C API
3314-----
3315
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003316- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3317 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003318
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003319- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3320 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3321 tp_as_number pointer.
3322
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003323- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3324 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3325 (SF #681367)
3326
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003327- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3328 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3329 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3330 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003331
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003332Tests
3333-----
3334
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003335- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003336 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3337 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3338 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3339 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3340 pydoc.)
3341
3342- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3343
3344- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003345
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003346Windows
3347-------
3348
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003349- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3350 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3351 time).
3352
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003353- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3354 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3355
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003356- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3357 release without strong cryptography.
3358
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003359- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003360 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003361
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003362- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3363 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3364
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003365Mac
3366---
3367
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003368- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3369 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003370
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003371- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3372 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3373 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003374
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003375- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3376 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003377
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003378- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3379 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3380 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3381 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003382
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003383- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003384 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3385 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3386 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003387
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003388
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003390=================================
3391
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003392*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003396
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003397- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3398
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003399- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3400 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003401 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003402 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003403 a different meaning than before.
3404
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003405- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003406 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003407 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003408
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003409- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003410 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003411 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003412
3413- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3414 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3415 and deallocation.
3416
3417- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3418 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3419
3420- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3421 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3422 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3423 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3424 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3425
3426- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3427 now detected by the garbage collector.
3428
3429- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3430 [SF bug 519621]
3431
3432- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3433 identifier.
3434
3435- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3436 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3437 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3438 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3439 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3440 [SF bug 563060]
3441
3442- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3443 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3444 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3445 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3446 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3447
3448- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3449 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3450 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3451
3452- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3453
3454- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3455 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3456 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3457 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3458 state of the slots would be lost.)
3459
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003460Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003462
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003463- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003464 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3465 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3466 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3467 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003468 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3469 Jython 2.1.
3470
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003471- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003472 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003473 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3474 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3475 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3476 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3477 these, see PEP 302.
3478
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003479- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3480 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3481 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3482
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003483- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3484 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3485 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3486
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003487- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3488 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3489 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3490
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003491- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3492 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3493 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3494 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3495 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3496 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3497 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3498 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3499 releases or implementations.
3500
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003501- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003502 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3503 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003504
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003505- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3506 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3507
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003508- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3509 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3510 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3511
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003512- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3513 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3514
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003515- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3516 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003517 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3518 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003519
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003520- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3521 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3522 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3523 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3524 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3525
3526 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3527 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3528 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3529 pattern.
3530
3531 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3532 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3533 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3534 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3535
3536 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3537 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3538 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3539 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3540 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3541 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3542
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003543- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3544 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3545 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3546 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3547 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3548 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3549 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3550 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003551
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003552- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3553 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3554 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3555 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3556 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003557 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3558 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3559 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3560 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3561 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3562 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3563 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003564
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003565- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3566 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3567
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003568- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3569 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3570 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3571 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3572 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3573 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3574 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3575 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3576 to Zack Weinberg!
3577
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003578- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3579 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3580 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3581 type. This has been fixed now.
3582
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003583- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3584 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3585 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3586
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003587- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3588 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3589 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3590 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3591 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3592 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3593 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3594 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003595 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003596
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003597- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3598 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3599 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003600
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003601- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3602 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3603 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3604 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3605 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3606 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3607 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3608 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003609 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003610 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3611 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3612
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003613- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3614 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3615 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3616 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3617 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3618 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3619 this.)
3620
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003621- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3622 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003623 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003624 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003625 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3626 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003627 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3628 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003629
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003630- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3631 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3632 currently running.
3633
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003634- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3635 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3636 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3637 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3638
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003639- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3640 as directory names.
3641
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003642- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3643 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3644
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003645- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3646 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3647
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003648- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003649 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3650 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003651
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003652- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3653 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3654 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3655 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3656 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3657
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003658- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3659 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3660 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3661 removed.
3662
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003663- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3664 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3665 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3666
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003667- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3668 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3669 to __debug__.
3670
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003671- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3672 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3673 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3674
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003675- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3676 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3677 deprecated now.
3678
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003679- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3680 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3681 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003682
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003683- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3684 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3685 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3686 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3687 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003688
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003689- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3690 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3691
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003692- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3693 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3694 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003695 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003696 is backward compatible.
3697
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003698- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3699 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3700 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3701 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3702 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3703
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003704- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3705 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3706 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3707 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3708 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3709 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003710
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003711- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3712 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3713
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003714- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3715 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3716
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003717- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3718 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3719 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3720 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3721 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3722
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003723- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3724 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3725 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3726
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003727- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003728 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3729
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003730- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3731 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3732 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003733
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003734- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3735 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3736
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003737- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3738 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3739 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3740
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003741- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003743Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003745
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003746- Added three operators to the operator module:
3747 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3748 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3749 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3750
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003751- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3752
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003753- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3754 archives.
3755
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003756- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3757 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3758 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3759
3760 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3761
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003762- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3763 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3764 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003765 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003766
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003767- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3768 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3769 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3770 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003771 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3772 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3773 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3774 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003775
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003776- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3777 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003778
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003779- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3780
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003781- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3782 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3783
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003784- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3785 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3786 supported.
3787
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003788- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3789
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003790- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3791 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003792
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003793- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3794 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3795
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003796- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3797
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003798- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3799 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3800
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003801- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3802 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3803 functions but callable type objects.
3804
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003805- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003806 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003807 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003808
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003809- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3810 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003811
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003812- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3813 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003814
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003815- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3816 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3817 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3818 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3819
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003820- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3821 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003822
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003823- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3824 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3825 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3826 and __imul__.
3827
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003828- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003829 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3830 is called.
3831
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003832- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3833 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3834 interpreter was compiled.
3835
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003836- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3837 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3838 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003839 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003840 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3841 1, not 2.
3842
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003843- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3844 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3845 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3846 limit.
3847
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003848- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3849 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3850 bug #623464.
3851
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003852- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3853 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3854 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3855 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003857Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003860- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3861
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003862- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3863 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3864 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3865 with Python 2.3a2.
3866
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003867- os.path exposes getctime.
3868
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003869- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003870 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003871 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003872 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003873 unit tests of floating point results.
3874
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003875- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3876 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3877 has been increased.
3878
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003879- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3880 executed.
3881
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003882- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3883 postinstallation script.
3884
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003885- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3886 test the current module.
3887
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003888- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003889 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3890 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3891 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3892 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3893
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003894- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003895 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003896 Ward's Optik package.
3897
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003898- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3899 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3900 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3901 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3902
3903- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3904 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003905 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003906
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003907- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3908 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3909 shelf are binary pickles.
3910
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003911- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3912 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3913
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003914- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3915 modules are iterators now.
3916
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003917- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3918 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3919 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3920 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3921 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3922 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003923
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003924- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3925 with their entity value.
3926
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003927- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3928
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003929- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3930 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003931
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003932- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3933 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003934 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003935
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003936- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3937 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3938 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3939 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3940 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3941 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3942 main():
3943
3944 import locale
3945 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3946
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003947- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3948 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3949
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003950- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3951 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3952 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3953 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3954 to the new standard.
3955
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003956- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3957 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3958 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3959 an extension to the database.
3960
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003961- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3962 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3963 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3964 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003965 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003966
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003967- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003968 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003969
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003970- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3971 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3972 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3973 bounded integers.
3974
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003975- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3976 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3977 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3978 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3979 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3980 in existence.
3981
3982 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3983 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3984 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3985 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3986 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3987 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3988
3989 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3990 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3991 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3992 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3993
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003994- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3995 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3996 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3997
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003998- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3999
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004000- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4001 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4002 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4003 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4004
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004005- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4006 argument.
4007
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004008- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4009 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4010 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4011 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4012 [SF patch 560794].
4013
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004014- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4015 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4016 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004017 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4018 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4019 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004020
4021- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4022 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004023
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004024- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4025 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4026 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4027 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004028
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004029- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4030 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4031 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4032 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4033 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4034
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004035- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004036
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004037- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4038
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004039- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4040 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4041 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4042 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4043 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4044 identical to None.
4045
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004046- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4047 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4048 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4049 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4050 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4051 results now.
4052
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004053- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4054 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4055
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004056- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4057 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4058 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4059 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4060 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4061 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4062 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4063 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4064
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004065- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4066
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004067- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4068 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4069
4070- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4071 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4072 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4073 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4074 and other systems.
4075
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004076- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4077 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4078 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4079 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 +00004080 work well with these.
4081
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004082- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4083
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004084- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004085 connections.
4086
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004087- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4088 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4089 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4090
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004091- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4092 sets
4093
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004094- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4095 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4096 name.
4097
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004098- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4099 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4100 passed in.
4101
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004102- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004103 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004104 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4105 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004106
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004107- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4108
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004109- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4110
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004111- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4112 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4113 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4114
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004115- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4116 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4117 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4118 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004119 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004120
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004121- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004122 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004123 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004124
4125- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4126 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4127 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4128
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004129- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004130 the value of its expression argument.
4131
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004132- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4133 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4134 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4135
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004136- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4137 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4138 skipstone browser was included.
4139
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004140- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4141 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4142
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004143Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004145
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004146- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4147 names in addition to accepting file names.
4148
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004149- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4150 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4151 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4152 still used and useful.)
4153
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004154- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4155 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4156 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4157 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004158
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004159- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4160 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4161 the generated binary.
4162
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004165
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004166- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4167
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004168- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4169 except in the hands of experts.
4170
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004171- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004172 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4173 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4174 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004175
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004176- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4177 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4178 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4179 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4180 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4181 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4182 builds.
4183
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004184- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4185 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4186 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4187 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4188 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4189 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4190 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4191 new type.
4192
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004193- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004194
4195 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4196 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4197 positive infinities.
4198
4199 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4200 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4201 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4202 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4203 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4204 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4205 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4206
4207 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4208
4209 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4210
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004211- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4212 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4213 size of the executable.
4214
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004215- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4216 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4217 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4218 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004219
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004220- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4221
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004222- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4223 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4224 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004225
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004226- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4227 well as Unix.
4228
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004229- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4230 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4231 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4232 modules in the README file for details.
4233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004236
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004237- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4238 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004239 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004240 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004241 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004242
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004243- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4244 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4245 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4246 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4247 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4248 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004249 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004250 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4251 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4252 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4253 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4254 aligned.)
4255
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004256- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4257 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4258 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4259
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004260- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4261 level.
4262
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004263- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4264 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4265 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4266 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4267 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4268
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004269- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4270 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4271 code.
4272
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004273- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4274 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4275 adjusting for negative indices.
4276
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004277- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4278 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4279 object.
4280
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004281- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4282 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4283 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4284
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004285- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4286 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004287
4288- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4289
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004290- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4291 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4292 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4293 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4294
4295- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4296
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004297- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004298
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004299- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004300 without going through the buffer API.
4301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004303
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004304- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4305 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4306 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4307 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004309- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4310 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4311
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004312- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004313 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004315New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004317
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004318- OpenVMS is now supported.
4319
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004320- AtheOS is now supported.
4321
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004322- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4323
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004324- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004326Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-----
4328
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004329- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4330 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4331 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004332
4333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004335
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004336- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4337 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4338 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4339 bugs.
4340 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004341 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004342 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4343 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004344 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004345
4346- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004347 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004348
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004349- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4350 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4351
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004352- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4353 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004354 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004355 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4356
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004357- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4358 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4359 use files" uninstall option).
4360
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004361- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4362
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004363- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4364 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4365
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004366- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4367 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4368 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4369
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004370- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4371 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4372 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4373 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4374 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004375 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4376 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4377 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004378
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004379- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004380 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004381 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4382 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4383 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4384 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4385 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4386 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4387 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4388 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4389 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4390 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4391 work around.
4392
4393- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4394 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4395 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4396 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4397 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4398 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4399 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4400 specified with O_CREAT too).
4401
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004402Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403----
4404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004405- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004406
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004407- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4408 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4409 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004411- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4412 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4413 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4414
4415- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4416 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4417 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4418 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4419 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4420 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4421 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4422 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004423
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004424- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4425 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4426 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004427
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004428- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4429 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4430 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4431 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4432 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004433
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004434- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4435 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4436 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004438- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4439 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004441- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4442 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4443 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4444 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4445 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004447- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4448 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4449 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4450
4451- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4452 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4453 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004454
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004455- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4456 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4457 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4458 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004459 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004460
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004461- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4462 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004464- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4465 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004466
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004467- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004468 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004469 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4470 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004471
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004472
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004474===============================
4475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4477
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004478Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004480
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004481- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4482 with a custom metaclass.
4483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004484Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004486
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004487- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4488 are proxies.
4489
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004490Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004492
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004493- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4494 very short strings.
4495
4496- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4497 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4498 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4499 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4500 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4501
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004504
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004505- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4506 close or delete time).
4507
4508- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4509 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4510
4511- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4512
4513- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004514 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004515
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004516Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004518
4519Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004521
4522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004524
4525New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004527
4528Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004530
4531Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004533
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004534- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4535
4536- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4537 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4538
4539- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4540 deleted at process exit time.
4541
4542- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4543 in backslash.
4544
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004545Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004547
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004548- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4549 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4550 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004552
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004553What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004554===========================
4555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004561- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4562 been extensively updated. See
4563
4564 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4565
4566 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4567
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004568- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4569 deleted!
4570
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004571- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4572 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4573 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4574 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4575 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4576
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004577- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4578
4579 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4580 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4581
4582 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4583 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4584 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4585 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4586 supported anyway.
4587
4588 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4589 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4590
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004591- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4592 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4593 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4594 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4595 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004596
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004597- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4598 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4599 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4600
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004601Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004603
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004604- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4605 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4606 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4607 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4608 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4609 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004610 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4611 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4612 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4613 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004614
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004615- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4616 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4617 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4618
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004619Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004621
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004622- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4623
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004624Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004627- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4628 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4629 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4630 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4631 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4632 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4633
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004634- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4635
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004636- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4637
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004638- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4639
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004640- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4641 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4642 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4643
4644- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4645
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004646Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004648
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004649- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4650 off a search on Google.
4651
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004652Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004654
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004655- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4656 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4657 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4658 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4659 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4660 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4661 other platforms should do likewise.
4662
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004663- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4664 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4665 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4666
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004667C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004669
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004670- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4671 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4672 producing key-value pairs.
4673
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004674- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004675 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004676 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4677 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4678 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4679 previously went unchallenged.
4680
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004681New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683
4684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004686
4687Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004689
4690Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004693- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4694 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004695
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004696- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4697 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4698 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4699 home.
4700
4701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004702What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004703===========================
4704
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004710- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4711 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004712
4713 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004714 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004715
4716 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4717 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004718 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004719 This needs to be documented.
4720
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004721- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4722 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4723
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004724- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4725 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4726 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4727
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004728- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4729 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4730
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004731- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4732 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4733 class forbids it).
4734
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004735- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4736 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4737 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4738
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004739- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004741Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004744- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4745 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004746 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004747
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004748- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4749 (like 1 + '').
4750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004751Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004753
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004754- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4755 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4756 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4757 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004758 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004759 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4760
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004761- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4762 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4763 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4764 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4765
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004766- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4767 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004768 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4769 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4770 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004771
4772- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4773 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004774
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004775- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4776 bytes on its input.
4777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004778Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004780
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004781- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004782 convenience function.
4783
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004784- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4785 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4786 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004787 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4788 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4789 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4790 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4791 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4792 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004793
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004794- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4795 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4796 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4797 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4798
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004799- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4800 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4801 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4802
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004803- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4804 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4805 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4806 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4807
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004808- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4809 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004811 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4812 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4813 new -l and -e options.
4814
4815- statcache is now deprecated.
4816
4817- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4818 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004820 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4821 time properly taken into account.
4822
4823- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4824 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4825 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4826 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004828Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830
4831Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004833
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004834- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4835 is built with libdb3 if available.
4836
4837- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4838
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004839C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004842- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4843 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4844 PySequence_Size().
4845
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004846- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4847
4848- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4849 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4850 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4851
4852- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4853 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4854
4855- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4856 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4857
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004858New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004860
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004861- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4862 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4863
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004864- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4865 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4866
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004867- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004871
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004872- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4873 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004875Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004877
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004878Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004880
4881- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4882 removed completely in the next release.
4883
4884- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4885 OSX.
4886
4887- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4888 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4889
4890- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4891
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004892
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004893What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004894===========================
4895
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4897
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004898Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004899--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004900
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004901- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004902 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004903 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004904 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4905 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004906 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4907 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004908 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4909 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004910
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004911- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4912 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4913
4914- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4915 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4916
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004917Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004919
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004920- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4921 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4922 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4923 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4924 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4925 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4926 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4927 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4928
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004929- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4930 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4931 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4932 example).
4933
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004934- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004935 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004936 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004937 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004938
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004939- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4940 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4941 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004942 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004943
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004944- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4945 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4946 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4947 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4948 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4949 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4950
4951 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4952
4953 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4954
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004955Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004957
4958- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4959
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004960- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4961
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004962- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4963 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004964
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004965- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4966 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4967 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4968 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4969 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4970 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004971 attributes.
4972
4973- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4974 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4975 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004976
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004977- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4978 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4979 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004980
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004981- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4982 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4983 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004984 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4985 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4986
4987- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4988 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004989
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004990Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004992
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004993- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4994 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4995
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004996- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4997 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4998 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4999 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5000
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005001- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5002 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5003 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5004 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5005
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005006 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5007 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5008 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5009 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5010 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5011 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5012 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5013 without losing information).
5014
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005015- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005016 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5017 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5018 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5019 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5020 module).
5021
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005022 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005023 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5024 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5025 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5026 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005027
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005028- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005029 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5030 encoding.
5031
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005032- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5033 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5034
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005036 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5037
5038- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5039 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5040 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5041 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5042
5043- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5044
5045- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5046 ON, and OFF.
5047
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005048- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5049 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5050
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005051Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005053
5054- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5055 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5056 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005057
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005058- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5059 been added: -X and -E.
5060
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005061Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005063
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005064- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5065 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5066
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005067C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005069
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005070- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5071 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5072 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5073 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5074 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5075
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005076- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5077 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5078 as long) arguments.
5079
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005080- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5081 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5082 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5083 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5084 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5085 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5086
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005087- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5088 input.
5089
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005090New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005092
5093Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005095
5096Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005098
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005099- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5100 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5101 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5102
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005103- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5104 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5105 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005106 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005107
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5109 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5110 import signal
5111 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005114 while 1:
5115 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005117 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5118 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5119 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5120 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005121
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005122
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005123What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5124===========================
5125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5127
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005128Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005130
5131- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5132 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5133 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5134
5135- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5136 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5137 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5138 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5139 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5140 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5141 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005142
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005143- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005144 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005145 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5146 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5147 associate a docstring with a property.
5148
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005149- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5150 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5151 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5152 other built-in object types.
5153
5154- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5155 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5156 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5157 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5158 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5159
5160- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5161 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5162
5163- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5164 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005165 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005166 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5167 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5168 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5169 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5170 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5171
5172- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5173 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5174 class.
5175
5176- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5177 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5178 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5179 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5180
5181- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5182 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5183 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5184 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5185
5186- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5187 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5188
5189- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5190 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5191 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5192 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5193 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005194 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005195 with the same value as s.
5196
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005197- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5198
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005199Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005201
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005202- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5203
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005204- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5205 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5206 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5207 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5208 objects.
5209
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005210- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5211 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005212 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5213 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5214
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005215- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5216 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5217 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005219Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005221
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005222- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5223 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5224 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5225 by the instances.
5226
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005227- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5228 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5229 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5230
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005231- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5232 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5233 before the entire comparison is complete.
5234
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005235- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5236 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5237 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5238
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005239- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5240 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5241 getwriter().
5242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005243- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5244 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5245
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005246- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005247 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5248 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5249
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005250- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5251 iterable object.
5252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005253- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5254 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005255
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005256- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5257 authentication.
5258
5259- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5260 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005261
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005262- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005263 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5264 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5265 a sample driver.)
5266
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005267Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005270- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5271 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5272 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5273 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5274 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5275 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5276 kernel has large file support.
5277
5278- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5279 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5280 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5281 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5282 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5283
5284- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5285 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5286 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5287
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005288C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005289-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005291- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5292 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5293
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005294New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005296
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005297- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5298 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5299
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005300Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005301-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005302
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005303- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5304 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5305 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5306 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5307 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5308
5309- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5310 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5311 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5312 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5313
5314- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5315 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5316
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005317Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005319
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005320- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005321 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5322 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005323
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005324
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005325What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5326===========================
5327
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5329
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005330Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005332
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005333- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5334 big to represent as a C double.
5335
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005336- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5337 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5338 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5339 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5340 restriction).
5341
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005342- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5343 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5344 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5345 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5346 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5347
5348 >>> dir([])
5349 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5350 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5351 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5352 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5353 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5354 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5355 'reverse', 'sort']
5356
5357 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5358
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005359- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005360 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5361 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5362 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5363 OverflowError exception.
5364
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005365- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005366 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005367 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5368 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5369 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5370 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5371 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005372 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5374 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5375
5376 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5377 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5378 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5379 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005380
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005381- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005382 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5383 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5384 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5385 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5386 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5387 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5388 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5389 once it is created.
5390
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005391- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5392 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5393 (key, value) pairs.
5394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005395- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005396 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5397 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5398
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005399- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5400 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5401 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5402 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5403 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005405- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005406 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5407 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5408
5409 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005411- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005412 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5413
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005414Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005416
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005417- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005418 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5419 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005420
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005421- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5422 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5423 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5424 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5425 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5426 in this area anymore).
5427
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005428- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5429 threading.Timer.
5430
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005431- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5432 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5433
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005434- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005435 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5436
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005437- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005438 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5439 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5440 converted to Python longs.
5441
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005442- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005443 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5444
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005445- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5446 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5447 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5448
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005449Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005451
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005452- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5453 division operators as per PEP 238.
5454
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005455Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005456-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005457
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005458- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5459 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5460 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5461 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5462
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005463C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005465
5466- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005467
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005468- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5469 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005470 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005471
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005472 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5473 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005474 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005475 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005476
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005477- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005478 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5479 module:
5480
5481 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005482
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005483 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5484 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005485
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005486 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5487 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005488
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005489 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5490
5491 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5492
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005493- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005494 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5495 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5496 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005497
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005498New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005500
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005501- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5502 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5503 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5504 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5505 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005506
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005507Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005509
5510Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005512
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005513- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5514 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5515 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5516 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005517 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5518 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5519 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5520 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5521 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005523- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005524 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5525
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005526
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005527What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5528===========================
5529
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5531
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005532Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005534
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005535- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5536 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5537
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005538- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5539 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5540 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005541
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005542- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5543 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5544 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5545 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005546
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005547- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5548
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005549- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005550
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005551Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005553
5554- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005555 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005556 the module docstring for details.
5557
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005560
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005561- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005562 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5563 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5564 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005565
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005566- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5567 Nick Mathewson.
5568
5569Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005571
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005572- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5573 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5574 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5575 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5576 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5577 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5578 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5579 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5580
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005581- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5582 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5583 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5584 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5585
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005586- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5587 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5588 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5589 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5590 come a long way).
5591
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005592- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5593 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5594 write filters for these warnings).
5595
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005596- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5597 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5598 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5599 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5600 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5601
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005602- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5603 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5604 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5605 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5606 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5607 older distribution.
5608
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005609Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005610-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005611
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005612- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5613 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005614 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005615
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005616- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5617 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5618 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5619
5620- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5621
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005622- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5623
5624- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5625
5626- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5627
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005629
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005630- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5631
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005632New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005633-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005634
5635C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005636-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005637
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005638- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5639 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5640 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5641 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5642 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5643 against buffer overruns.
5644
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005645- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005646 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5647 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005648 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5649 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5650 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5651
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005652- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5653 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5654 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5655 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5656 deprecated.
5657
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005660
5661- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5662 relevant is found.
5663
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005664
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005665What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005666===========================
5667
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005668*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5669
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005670Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005671----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005672
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005673- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5674 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5675 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5676 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5677 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5678 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5679 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5680 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005681 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005682 repaired.
5683
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005684- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005685 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005686 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5687 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5688 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5689 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5690 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5691 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5692 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5693 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5694
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005695- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5696 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5697 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5698 leading BMO character).
5699
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005700- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5701 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5702 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5703
5704 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5705 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5706 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005707
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005708 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5709 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5710 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5711 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5712 for various simple to use conversions.
5713
5714 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5715 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5716
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5718 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5719 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5720 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5721 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5722 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5723 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5724 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5725 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5726 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5727 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5728 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5729 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5730 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5731 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005732
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005733- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5734 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5735 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005736 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005737 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005738
5739 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005740 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5741 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5742 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5743 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5744 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005745 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5746 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005747
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005748 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5749 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5750 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005751 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005752
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005753- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5754 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5755 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5756 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5757 floating arithmetic,
5758
5759 x = 9007199254740992.0
5760 print long(x)
5761
5762 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5763 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5764 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5765 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5766 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5767 functions are of good quality).
5768
5769 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5770 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5771 algorithms to break.
5772
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005773- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5774 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5775 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5776 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5777 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5778 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5779 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5780 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5781 order.
5782
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005783- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5784 operation along the most common code paths.
5785
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005786- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5787 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5788
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005789- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5790 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5791 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5792 {}.update(UserDict())
5793
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005794- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5795 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5796 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5797 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5798 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5799 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5800 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5801 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5802
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005803- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005804 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005805
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005806 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005807 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5808 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005809 join() method of strings
5810 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005811 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5812 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005813 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005814 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005815
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005816- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5817 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5818
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005819- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5820 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5821
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005822- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5823 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5824 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5825 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5826
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005827- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5828 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005829 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005830 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5831 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005832
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005833- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5834
5835
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005836Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005837-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005838
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005839- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005840 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005841 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5842 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5843
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005844- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5845 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5846
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005847- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5848 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5849 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5850 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5851
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005852- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5853 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5854 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5855
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005856- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5857
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005858- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5859
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005860- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5861 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5862 that are still imported into string.py).
5863
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005864- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5865
5866- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5867 Now it does.
5868
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005869- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5870
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005871- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5872 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5873 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5874 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5875 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005876 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5877 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005878
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005879- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5880 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5881 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5882 'help(object)'.
5883
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005884Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005885-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005886
5887- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005888 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005889 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5890 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5891
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005892- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005893 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5894 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005895
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005896C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005897-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005898
5899- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5900 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005901
5902----
5903
5904**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**