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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
16 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
17 which was missing for no apparent reason.
18
19- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
20 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
21 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
22
23Extension modules
24-----------------
25
26Library
27-------
28
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000029- decimal.py now only uses signals in the spec. The other conditions are
30 no longer part of the public API.
31
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000032- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
33 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
34 string methods of the same name).
35
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000036Tools/Demos
37-----------
38
39Build
40-----
41
42C API
43-----
44
45New platforms
46-------------
47
48Tests
49-----
50
51Windows
52-------
53
54Mac
55---
56
57
58
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000059What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
60=================================
61
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +000062*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000063
64Core and builtins
65-----------------
66
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000067- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
68 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
69 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
70 objects now (one object instead of three).
71
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000072- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
73 Windows DLLs.
74
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000075- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
76
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000077- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
78 a new .pyc magic.
79
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000080- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
81 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
82 be there.
83
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000084- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
85 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
86 the LC_NUMERIC category.
87
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000088- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
89 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
90 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
91
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000092- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
93
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000094- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
95 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
96 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000097
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000098- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
99 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
100
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000101- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
102
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000103- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000104 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000105
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000106- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
107
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000108- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
109
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000110- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
111 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
112
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000113- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
114 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
115 Fixes bug #858016 .
116
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000117- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
118 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
119 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
120
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000121- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
122 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
123 improves their performance (about 35%).
124
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000125- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
126 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
127 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
128
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000129- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
130 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
131 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
132 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
133
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000134- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
135 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
136 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
137 length is not known).
138
139- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
140 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000141 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
142 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000143 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
144
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000145- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
146 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
147
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000148- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
149 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
150 keyword arguments.
151
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000152- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
153 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
154 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
155
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000156- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
157 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
158 cases.
159
160- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
161 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
162 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
163 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
164 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
165 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
166 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
167 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
168 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
169 a release build.
170
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000171- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
172 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
173
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000174- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000175 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000176
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000177- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
178 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
179 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
180 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
181 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
182 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
183 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
184 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
185 destroyed.
186
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000187- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
188 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
189 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
190 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
191 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
192 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
193 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
194 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
195
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000196- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
197 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
198 character other than a space.
199
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000200- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
201 by the function object or by the method object, the function
202 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
203 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
204 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
205 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
206 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
207 attributes with the same name.
208
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000209- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
210 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
211 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
212 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
213 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
214 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
215 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
216 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
217 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
218 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
219 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
220 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
221 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
222 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000223
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000224- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
225 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
226 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
227 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
228 This has been repaired.
229
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000230- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
231
232- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
233
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000234- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
235 over a sequence.
236
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000237- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000238 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000239
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000240- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
241
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000242- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
243 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
244 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
245 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
246 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
247 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
248 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
249 records with equal keys is unchanged).
250
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000251- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
252 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
253 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
254
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000255- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
256 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
257 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
258 freelist.
259
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000260- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
261 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
262
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000263- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
264 number.
265
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000266- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
267 a TypeError exception.
268
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000269- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
270 820195.
271
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000272- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
273 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
274 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
275
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000276- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000277 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
278 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000279
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000280- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
281 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
282 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
283
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000284- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
285 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000286 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000287
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000288- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000289 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
290 the first call.
291
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000292
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000293Extension modules
294-----------------
295
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000296- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
297 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
298
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000299- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
300 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
301 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
302 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
303 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
304 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
305 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000306
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000307- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
308
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000309- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
310
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000311- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
312 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
313
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000314- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
315 fewer false positives.
316
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000317- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
318 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
319
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000320- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000321 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
322
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000323- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000324 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000325 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
326 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
327 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000328
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000329- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
330 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
331 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
332 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
333
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000334- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
335 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
336 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
337 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
338 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
339 #897625.
340
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000341- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
342 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
343
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000344- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
345 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
346 and pops on either side of the deque.
347
348- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
349 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
350
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000351- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
352 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
353 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
354 other functions that expect a function argument.
355
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000356- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
357
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000358- os.getsid was added.
359
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000360- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
361 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
362 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
363
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000364- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
365
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000366- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
367
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000368- readline.clear_history was added.
369
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000370- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
371
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000372- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
373
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000374- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
375
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000376- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
377
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000378- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
379
380- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
381
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000382- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
383
384- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
385
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000386- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
387 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
388 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
389
390- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
391 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
392 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
393 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
394 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
395 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
396 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
397
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000398- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
399 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
400 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
401 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000402
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000403- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000404 iterators from a single iterable.
405
406- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
407 of raising a TypeError exception.
408
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000409- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
410 as parameter.
411
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000412Library
413-------
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000414
415- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
416 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
417 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000418
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000419- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
420 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
421 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000422
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000423- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000424
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000425- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
426 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000427
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000428- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
429 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
430
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000431- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
432
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000433- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000434 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000435
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000436- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
437 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
438
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000439- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
440
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000441- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
442 on cygwin and mingw32.
443
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000444- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
445
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000446- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
447 module.
448
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000449- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
450 installation scheme for all platforms.
451
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000452- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000453 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000454
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000455- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
456 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
457 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
458
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000459- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
460 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
461 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
462
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000463- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
464
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000465- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
466
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000467- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
468 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
469
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000470- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
471 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
472 type pattern with the same value exists.
473
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000474- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
475 when run from the command prompt).
476
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000477- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
478 not taken into consideration when caching value.
479
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000480- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
481 default sort).
482
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000483- Added global runctx function to profile module
484
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000485- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
486
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000487- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
488
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000489- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
490
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000491- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000492 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
493 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
494 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
495 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
496 accordingly.
497
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000498- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
499 decoding standards.
500
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000501- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
502 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
503 called for all requests.
504
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000505- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
506 they are passed to the compiler.
507
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000508- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
509 indent, width and depth.
510
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000511- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
512 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
513
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000514- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
515 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
516
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000517- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
518
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000519- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
520
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000521- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
522
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000523- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
524 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
525
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000526- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000527 for better performance.
528
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000529- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000530
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000531- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
532 a string).
533
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000534- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
535
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000536- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
537
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000538- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
539
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000540- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
541
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000542- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
543 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
544 list of fieldnames.
545
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000546- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
547 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
548
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000549- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
550
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000551- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
552 empty lists.
553
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000554- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
555 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
556 and shelves.
557
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000558- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
559 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
560
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000561- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000562 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
563 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000564
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000565- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
566 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000567 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000568
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000569- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000570 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
571 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
572
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000573- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
574 and removed in Py2.4.
575
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000576- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
577
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000578- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
579
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000580Tools/Demos
581-----------
582
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000583- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
584 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
585
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000586- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
587
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000588- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
589 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
590 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
591 destination in situations where both files are given.
592
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000593- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
594 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
595 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
596 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
597
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000598- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
599
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000600- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
601 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
602 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
603 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
604 now.
605
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000606- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
607 in effect
608
609- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
610 C-c C-h
611
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000612- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
613 -d option was given.
614
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000615Build
616-----
617
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000618- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
619 build under OS X.
620
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000621- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
622 --enable-profiling.
623
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000624- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
625 is configured --with-tsc.
626
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000627- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
628 on AMD64.
629
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000630- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
631 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
632
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000633- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
634 removed.
635
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000636- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
637 supported (see PEP 11).
638
639- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
640
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000641- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
642
643- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
644 (see PEP 11).
645
646- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
647 sizeof(char) must be 1.
648
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000649C API
650-----
651
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000652- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
653 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
654 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
655
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000656- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
657 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
658 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
659 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
660
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000661- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
662 generator objects.
663
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000664- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
665 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000666 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
667 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000668
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000669- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
670 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
671
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000672- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
673 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
674 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
675 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
676 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
677
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000678- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
679 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
680 about 10% faster.
681
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000682- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
683 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
684
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000685- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
686 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
687 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
688 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
689
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000690Windows
691-------
692
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000693- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
694 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
695 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
696 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
697
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000698- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
699 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
700 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
701
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000702
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000703What's New in Python 2.3 final?
704===============================
705
706*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
707
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000708IDLE
709----
710
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000711- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
712 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
713 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
714 context-menu actions.
715
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000716- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
717 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
718 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
719 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
720 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
721 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
722 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
723 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
724 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
725
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000726
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000727What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
728=============================================
729
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000730*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000731
732Core and builtins
733-----------------
734
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000735- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000736 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000737 comment at the end are still unsupported.
738
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000739Extension modules
740-----------------
741
742- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
743 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
744 than once. This has been fixed.
745
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000746- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
747 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
748 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
749 call.
750
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000751- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
752
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000753Library
754-------
755
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000756- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
757 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
758
759- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
760 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
761 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
762 restored.
763
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000764IDLE
765----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000766
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000767- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000768
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000769Build
770-----
771
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000772- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
773 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
774
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000775C API
776-----
777
778Windows
779-------
780
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000781- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
782 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
783
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000784- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
785
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000786Mac
787---
788
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000789- Various fixes to pimp.
790
791- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
792
793- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
794 more problems than it solves.
795
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000796
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000797What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
798=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000799
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000800*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
801
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000802Core and builtins
803-----------------
804
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000805- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
806 by sys.setcheckinterval().
807
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000808- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
809 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000810 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000811
812- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
813 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
814 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000815 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000816
817- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
818 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000819
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000820- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
821 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
822 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
823
824- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000825 770247.
826
827- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000828
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000829Extension modules
830-----------------
831
832- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
833 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
834
835- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
836
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000837- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
838
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000839- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
840 contained within the _strptime module.
841
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000842- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
843 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
844
845- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000846 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
847
848- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
849 the find_class attribute, if present.
850
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000851- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000852
853 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
854 (SF bug 763298).
855
856 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000857 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
858 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
859 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000860
861 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
862
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000863Library
864-------
865
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000866- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
867
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000868- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
869 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
870 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
871 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
872 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
873 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
874 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
875 or Tester().
876
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000877- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
878 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
879 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
880 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
881 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
882 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
883 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
884 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
885 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000886
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000887 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000888
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000889- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
890 weren't before was an oversight.
891
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000892- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
893 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
894
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000895- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
896 when there are no lines.
897
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000898- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
899 which could occur with Tk 8.4
900
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000901- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
902 to child processes.
903
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000904- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
905
906- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
907
908- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
909 xmlrpclib.
910
911- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
912 responses.
913
914- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
915 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
916
917- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
918 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
919 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
920
921- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
922 used as patterns.
923
924- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
925 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
926 than Tk 8.3.
927
928- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
929
930- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000931
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000932Tools/Demos
933-----------
934
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000935- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
936
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000937- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
938
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000939- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000940
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000941Build
942-----
943
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000944- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
945
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000946- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
947
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000948- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
949 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000950
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000951- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
952 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
953 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000954
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000955C API
956-----
957
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000958- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
959 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
960
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000961Windows
962-------
963
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000964- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
965 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
966 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
967 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
968 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
969 Python exception ::
970
971 thread.error: can't start new thread
972
973 is raised now.
974
975- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
976 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
977 instead of from DLL teardown.
978
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000979Mac
980---
981
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000982- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000983 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000984 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
985 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
986 the executable in the bundle.
987
988- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000989
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000990- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
991
992- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
993 on Panther.
994
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000995What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
996================================
997
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000998*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000999
1000Core and builtins
1001-----------------
1002
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001003- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1004 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1005 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1006 with the -i option.
1007
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001008- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1009 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1010
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001011- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1012 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1013
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001014- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1015 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1016 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1017 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1018 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1019 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1020 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1021 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1022 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1023 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1024 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1025 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1026 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001027
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001028- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1029 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1030 embedded in a lambda expression.
1031
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001032- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1033 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1034 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1035 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1036 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1037
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001038- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1039 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1040 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1041
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001042- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1043 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1044
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001045- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1046 It's writable again.
1047
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001048- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1049 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1050 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001051 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001052
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001053- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1054 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1055 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1056
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001057Extension modules
1058-----------------
1059
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001060- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1061 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1062
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001063- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1064 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1065 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1066 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1067
1068- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1069 collection.
1070
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001071- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1072 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1073 unique within a single program run.
1074
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001075- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1076 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1077
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001078- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1079 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1080
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001081- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1082 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001083
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001084- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1085
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001086- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1087 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1088
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001089- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1090 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1091 for many BSD-derived systems.
1092
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001093
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001094Library
1095-------
1096
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001097- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1098 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1099 primary ones:
1100
1101 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1102 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1103 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1104
1105 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1106 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1107 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1108 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1109 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1110 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1111
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001112- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1113 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1114 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1115 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1116 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1117 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1118 argument.
1119
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001120- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1121 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1122 in the archive.
1123
1124- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1125 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1126
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001127- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1128 569574).
1129
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001130- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1131 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1132 no more.
1133
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001134- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1135 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1136 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1137 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1138 code coverage.
1139
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001140- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1141 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1142 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001143 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1144 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001145
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001146- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1147 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1148 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001149 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001150
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001151- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1152
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001153- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1154 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1155 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1156 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1157
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001158- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1159 handling.
1160
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001161- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1162 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1163
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001164- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1165 in socket.py.
1166
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001167- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1168
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001169- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1170 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1171 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1172 opener with proxy support.
1173
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001174- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1175
1176- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1177
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001178Tools/Demos
1179-----------
1180
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001181- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1182
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001183- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1184
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001185- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1186 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001187
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001188- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1189 files.
1190
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001191Build
1192-----
1193
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001194- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001195 different root directory.
1196
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001197C API
1198-----
1199
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001200- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1201 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1202 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1203 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1204 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1205 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1206 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1207 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1208 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1209 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1210
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001211- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1212 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1213 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1214 from Python.
1215
1216
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001217New platforms
1218-------------
1219
1220None this time.
1221
1222Tests
1223-----
1224
1225- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1226 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1227
1228Windows
1229-------
1230
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001231- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1232
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001233- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1234 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1235 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1236 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1237 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1238 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1239 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1240 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1241 that's what it's for.
1242
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001243Mac
1244---
1245
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001246- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1247 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1248 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1249 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001250- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1251 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1252- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001253
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001254SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1255------------------------------------
1256
1257430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1258598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1259622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1260661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1261683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1262697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1263713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1264724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1265727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1266729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1267730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1268731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1269732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1270733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1271735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1272740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1273744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1274745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1275747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1276749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1277751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1278753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1279755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1280757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1281760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1282
1283
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001284What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1285================================
1286
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001287*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001288
1289Core and builtins
1290-----------------
1291
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001292- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1293 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1294
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001295- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1296 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1297 and cannot be strings).
1298
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001299- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1300 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1301 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1302 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1303
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001304- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1305 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1306 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1307 Python itself.
1308
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001309- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1310 the referenced object, if it has one.
1311
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001312- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1313 the thread started at
1314 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1315
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001316- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1317 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1318 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1319 placed on a list index.
1320
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001321- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1322 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1323 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1324 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1325
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001326- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1327 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1328 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1329 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1330 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1331 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1332 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1333
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001334- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1335 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1336 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1337 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1338 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1339
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001340- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1341 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001342
1343- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1344 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1345 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1346 #693195.)
1347
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001348- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1349 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001350
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001351- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001352 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001353 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1354 interpreter executions, would fail.
1355
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001356- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001357 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001358 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001359
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001360Extension modules
1361-----------------
1362
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001363- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1364 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1365 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1366 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1367
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001368- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1369 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1370
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001371- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1372 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1373 and Greg Chapman.)
1374
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001375- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1376 recursively.
1377
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001378- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001379 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1380 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1381 leaks.
1382
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001383- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1384
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001385- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1386 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1387 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1388 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1389 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1390 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1391 #705836.
1392
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001393- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001394 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1395
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001396- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1397 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1398 See SF bug #692416.
1399
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001400- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1401 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1402
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001403- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1404 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1405 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001406
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001407- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001408 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1409 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1410
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001411- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1412 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1413 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1414 timeouts to work properly.
1415
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001416Library
1417-------
1418
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001419- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1420 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1421 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1422 future release.
1423
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001424- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1425 for querying platform dependent features.
1426
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001427- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001428
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001429- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1430 pickle protocol versions.
1431
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001432- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1433 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1434 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1435
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001436- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1437
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001438- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1439 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1440 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1441 modules.
1442
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001443- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1444 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1445 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1446
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001447- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1448 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1449
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001450- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1451 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1452 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1453
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001454- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001455 MS Office extensions.
1456
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001457- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1458 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1459
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001460- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1461 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1462
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001463- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1464 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1465 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1466 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1467 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1468 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1469
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001470- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1471 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1472 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001473
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001474- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1475 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1476 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1477
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001478- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1479
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001480- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1481 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1482 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1483
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001484Tools/Demos
1485-----------
1486
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001487- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1488 See the module docstring for details.
1489
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001490Build
1491-----
1492
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001493- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1494 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001495
1496C API
1497-----
1498
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001499- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1500
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001501- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1502 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1503 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1504
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001505- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1506 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001507
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001508 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1509 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1510 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001511
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001512- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001513 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1514
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001515- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1516 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1517 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001518
1519New platforms
1520-------------
1521
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001522None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001523
1524Tests
1525-----
1526
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001527- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1528 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001529
1530Windows
1531-------
1532
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001533- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1534 function.
1535
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001536- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1537 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001538
1539Mac
1540---
1541
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001542- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1543 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001544
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001545- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1546 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001547
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001548- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1549 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1550 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001551
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001552- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001553 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1554 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001555
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001556- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1557 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001558
1559
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001560What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1561=================================
1562
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001563*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001564
1565Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001566-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001567
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001568- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1569 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1570 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1571
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001572- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1573 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1574 (SF patch #664376.)
1575
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001576- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1577 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1578 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1579 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1580 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1581 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001582 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001583
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001584- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1585 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1586 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1587 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001588 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001589
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001590- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1591 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1592 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1593 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1594 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1595 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1596 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1597 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1598 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1599 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1600 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1601
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001602- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1603 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1604 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1605 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1606 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1607 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1608
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001609- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1610 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1611
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001612- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1613 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1614 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1615 case.)
1616
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001617- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1618 passed as unicode strings.
1619
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001620- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1621 See SF bug #683467.
1622
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001623- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1624 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1625
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001626- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1627
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001628- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1629
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001630- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1631 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1632 arguments.
1633
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001634- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1635 See SF bug #667147.
1636
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001637- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001638 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001639 See SF bug #676155.
1640
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001641- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001642 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001643 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1644 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1645 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1646 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1647 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1648 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001649
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001650Extension modules
1651-----------------
1652
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001653- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1654 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1655 tp_as_number pointer.
1656
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001657- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1658 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1659 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1660 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1661 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1662
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001663- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1664
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001665- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1666
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001667- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001668 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001669 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1670 patch #678531.)
1671
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001672- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1673 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1674
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001675- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1676 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1677
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001678- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1679
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001680- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1681 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1682 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1683
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001684- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1685
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001686- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1687 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1688
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001689- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001690
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001691- datetime changes:
1692
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001693 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1694
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001695 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1696 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1697 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1698 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1699 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1700 now.
1701
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001702 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001703 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1704 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001705
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001706 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001707 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001708 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1709 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1710 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1711 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001712
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001713 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1714 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1715 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001716 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1717
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001718 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1719 by a later example coded by Guido.
1720
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001721 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001722 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1723 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1724 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001725 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1726 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1727
1728 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1729 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1730 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1731 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1732 tzinfo subclass instance.
1733
1734 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1735 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1736 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1737 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1738 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1739 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1740 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1741 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001742
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001743 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1744 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1745 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1746 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1747 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001748 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1749
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001750 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001751
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001752 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1753 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1754 as a naive datetime object.
1755
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001756 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1757 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1758 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1759
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001760 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1761 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1762 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1763 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1764 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1765 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1766 comparison.
1767
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001768 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1769 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1770 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1771 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001772 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001773
1774 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001775
1776 and ::
1777
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001778 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1779
1780 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1781 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1782 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1783 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1784
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001785 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1786 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1787 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1788 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1789 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1790
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001791 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1792 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001793 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1794 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001795
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001796Library
1797-------
1798
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001799- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1800 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1801
1802- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1803 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1804 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1805 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1806 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1807 See PEP 307 for details.
1808
1809- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1810 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1811
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001812- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1813 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001814 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001815 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1816 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001817 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001818
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001819- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1820 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1821
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001822- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1823 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1824 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1825
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001826- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1827
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001828- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1829 exception.
1830
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001831- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1832 class.
1833
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001834- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1835 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1836 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1837
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001838- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1839 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1840
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001841- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001842 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1843 See SF bug #659228.
1844
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001845- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1846 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1847 See SF patch #651082.
1848
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001849- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001850
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001851- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1852 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1853
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001854- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001855 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001856
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001857- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1858 DOS paths from other platforms.
1859
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001860Tools/Demos
1861-----------
1862
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001863- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1864 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1865 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1866 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1867 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1868 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1869 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1870 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1871 example:
1872
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001873 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1874 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001875
1876 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1877
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001878
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001879Build
1880-----
1881
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001882- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1883 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1884 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001885 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1886
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001887 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1888
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001889- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1890 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1891 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1892 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1893 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1894 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1895 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1896 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1897 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1898
1899- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1900 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1901 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1902 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1903
1904- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1905 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1906
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001907C API
1908-----
1909
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001910- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1911 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001912
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001913- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1914 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1915 tp_as_number pointer.
1916
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001917- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1918 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1919 (SF #681367)
1920
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001921- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1922 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1923 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1924 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001925
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001926Tests
1927-----
1928
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001929- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001930 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1931 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1932 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1933 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1934 pydoc.)
1935
1936- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1937
1938- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001939
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001940Windows
1941-------
1942
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001943- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1944 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1945 time).
1946
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001947- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1948 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1949
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001950- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1951 release without strong cryptography.
1952
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001953- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001954 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001955
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001956- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1957 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1958
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001959Mac
1960---
1961
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001962- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1963 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001964
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001965- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1966 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1967 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001968
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001969- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1970 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001971
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001972- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1973 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1974 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1975 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001976
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001977- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001978 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1979 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1980 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001981
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001982
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001983What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001984=================================
1985
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001986*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001988Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001990
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001991- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1992
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001993- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1994 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001995 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001996 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001997 a different meaning than before.
1998
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001999- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002000 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002001 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002002
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002003- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002004 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002005 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002006
2007- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2008 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2009 and deallocation.
2010
2011- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2012 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2013
2014- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2015 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2016 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2017 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2018 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2019
2020- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2021 now detected by the garbage collector.
2022
2023- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2024 [SF bug 519621]
2025
2026- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2027 identifier.
2028
2029- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2030 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2031 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2032 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2033 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2034 [SF bug 563060]
2035
2036- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2037 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2038 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2039 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2040 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2041
2042- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2043 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2044 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2045
2046- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2047
2048- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2049 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2050 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2051 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2052 state of the slots would be lost.)
2053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002054Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002056
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002057- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002058 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2059 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2060 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2061 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002062 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2063 Jython 2.1.
2064
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002065- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002066 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002067 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2068 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2069 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2070 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2071 these, see PEP 302.
2072
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002073- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2074 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2075 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2076
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002077- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2078 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2079 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2080
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002081- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2082 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2083 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2084
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002085- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2086 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2087 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2088 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2089 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2090 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2091 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2092 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2093 releases or implementations.
2094
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002095- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002096 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2097 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002098
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002099- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2100 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2101
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002102- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2103 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2104 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2105
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002106- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2107 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2108
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002109- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2110 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002111 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2112 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002113
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002114- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2115 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2116 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2117 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2118 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2119
2120 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2121 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2122 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2123 pattern.
2124
2125 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2126 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2127 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2128 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2129
2130 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2131 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2132 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2133 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2134 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2135 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2136
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002137- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2138 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2139 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2140 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2141 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2142 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2143 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2144 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002145
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002146- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2147 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2148 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2149 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2150 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002151 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2152 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2153 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2154 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2155 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2156 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2157 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002158
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002159- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2160 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2161
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002162- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2163 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2164 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2165 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2166 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2167 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2168 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2169 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2170 to Zack Weinberg!
2171
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002172- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2173 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2174 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2175 type. This has been fixed now.
2176
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002177- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2178 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2179 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2180
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002181- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2182 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2183 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2184 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2185 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2186 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2187 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2188 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002189 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002190
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002191- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2192 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2193 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002194
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002195- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2196 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2197 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2198 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2199 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2200 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2201 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2202 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002203 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002204 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2205 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2206
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002207- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2208 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2209 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2210 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2211 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2212 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2213 this.)
2214
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002215- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2216 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002217 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002218 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002219 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2220 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002221 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2222 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002223
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002224- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2225 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2226 currently running.
2227
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002228- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2229 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2230 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2231 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2232
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002233- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2234 as directory names.
2235
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002236- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2237 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2238
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002239- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2240 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2241
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002242- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002243 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2244 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002245
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002246- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2247 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2248 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2249 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2250 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2251
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002252- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2253 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2254 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2255 removed.
2256
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002257- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2258 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2259 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2260
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002261- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2262 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2263 to __debug__.
2264
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002265- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2266 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2267 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2268
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002269- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2270 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2271 deprecated now.
2272
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002273- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2274 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2275 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002276
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002277- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2278 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2279 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2280 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2281 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002282
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002283- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2284 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2285
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002286- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2287 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2288 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002289 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002290 is backward compatible.
2291
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002292- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2293 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2294 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2295 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2296 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2297
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002298- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2299 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2300 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2301 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2302 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2303 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002304
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002305- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2306 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2307
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002308- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2309 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2310
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002311- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2312 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2313 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2314 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2315 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2316
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002317- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2318 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2319 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2320
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002321- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002322 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2323
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002324- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2325 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2326 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002327
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002328- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2329 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2330
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002331- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2332 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2333 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2334
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002335- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2336
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002337Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002339
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002340- Added three operators to the operator module:
2341 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2342 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2343 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2344
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002345- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2346
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002347- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2348 archives.
2349
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002350- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2351 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2352 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2353
2354 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2355
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002356- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2357 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2358 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002359 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002360
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002361- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2362 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2363 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2364 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002365 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2366 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2367 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2368 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002369
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002370- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2371 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002372
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002373- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2374
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002375- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2376 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2377
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002378- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2379 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2380 supported.
2381
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002382- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2383
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002384- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2385 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002386
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002387- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2388 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2389
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002390- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2391
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002392- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2393 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2394
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002395- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2396 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2397 functions but callable type objects.
2398
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002399- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002400 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002401 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002402
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002403- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2404 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002405
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002406- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2407 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002408
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002409- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2410 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2411 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2412 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2413
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002414- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2415 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002416
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002417- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2418 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2419 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2420 and __imul__.
2421
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002422- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002423 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2424 is called.
2425
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002426- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2427 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2428 interpreter was compiled.
2429
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002430- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2431 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2432 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002433 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002434 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2435 1, not 2.
2436
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002437- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2438 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2439 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2440 limit.
2441
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002442- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2443 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2444 bug #623464.
2445
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002446- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2447 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2448 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2449 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002451Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002453
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002454- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2455
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002456- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2457 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2458 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2459 with Python 2.3a2.
2460
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002461- os.path exposes getctime.
2462
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002463- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002464 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002465 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002466 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002467 unit tests of floating point results.
2468
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002469- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2470 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2471 has been increased.
2472
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002473- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2474 executed.
2475
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002476- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2477 postinstallation script.
2478
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002479- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2480 test the current module.
2481
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002482- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002483 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2484 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2485 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2486 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2487
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002488- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002489 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002490 Ward's Optik package.
2491
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002492- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2493 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2494 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2495 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2496
2497- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2498 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002499 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002500
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002501- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2502 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2503 shelf are binary pickles.
2504
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002505- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2506 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2507
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002508- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2509 modules are iterators now.
2510
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002511- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2512 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2513 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2514 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2515 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2516 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002517
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002518- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2519 with their entity value.
2520
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002521- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2522
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002523- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2524 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002525
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002526- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2527 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002528 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002529
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002530- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2531 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2532 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2533 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2534 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2535 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2536 main():
2537
2538 import locale
2539 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2540
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002541- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2542 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2543
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002544- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2545 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2546 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2547 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2548 to the new standard.
2549
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002550- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2551 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2552 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2553 an extension to the database.
2554
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002555- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2556 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2557 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2558 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002559 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002560
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002561- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002562 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002563
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002564- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2565 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2566 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2567 bounded integers.
2568
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002569- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2570 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2571 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2572 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2573 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2574 in existence.
2575
2576 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2577 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2578 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2579 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2580 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2581 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2582
2583 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2584 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2585 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2586 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2587
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002588- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2589 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2590 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2591
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002592- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2593
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002594- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2595 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2596 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2597 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2598
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002599- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2600 argument.
2601
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002602- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2603 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2604 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2605 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2606 [SF patch 560794].
2607
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002608- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2609 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2610 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002611 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2612 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2613 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002614
2615- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2616 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002617
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002618- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2619 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2620 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2621 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002622
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002623- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2624 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2625 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2626 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2627 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2628
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002629- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002630
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002631- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2632
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002633- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2634 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2635 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2636 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2637 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2638 identical to None.
2639
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002640- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2641 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2642 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2643 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2644 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2645 results now.
2646
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002647- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2648 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2649
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002650- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2651 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2652 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2653 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2654 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2655 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2656 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2657 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2658
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002659- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2660
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002661- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2662 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2663
2664- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2665 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2666 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2667 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2668 and other systems.
2669
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002670- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2671 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2672 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2673 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 +00002674 work well with these.
2675
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002676- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2677
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002678- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002679 connections.
2680
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002681- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2682 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2683 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2684
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002685- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2686 sets
2687
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002688- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2689 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2690 name.
2691
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002692- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2693 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2694 passed in.
2695
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002696- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002697 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002698 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2699 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002700
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002701- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2702
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002703- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2704
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002705- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2706 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2707 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2708
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002709- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2710 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2711 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2712 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002713 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002714
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002715- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002716 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002717 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002718
2719- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2720 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2721 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2722
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002723- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002724 the value of its expression argument.
2725
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002726- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2727 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2728 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2729
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002730- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2731 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2732 skipstone browser was included.
2733
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002734- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2735 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2736
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002737Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002739
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002740- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2741 names in addition to accepting file names.
2742
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002743- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2744 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2745 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2746 still used and useful.)
2747
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002748- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2749 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2750 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2751 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002752
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002753- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2754 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2755 the generated binary.
2756
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002757Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002758-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002759
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002760- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2761
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002762- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2763 except in the hands of experts.
2764
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002765- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002766 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2767 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2768 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002769
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002770- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2771 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2772 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2773 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2774 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2775 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2776 builds.
2777
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002778- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2779 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2780 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2781 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2782 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2783 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2784 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2785 new type.
2786
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002787- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002788
2789 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2790 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2791 positive infinities.
2792
2793 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2794 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2795 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2796 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2797 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2798 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2799 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2800
2801 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2802
2803 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2804
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002805- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2806 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2807 size of the executable.
2808
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002809- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2810 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2811 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2812 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002813
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002814- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2815
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002816- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2817 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2818 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002819
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002820- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2821 well as Unix.
2822
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002823- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2824 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2825 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2826 modules in the README file for details.
2827
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002828C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002830
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002831- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2832 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002833 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002834 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002835 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002836
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002837- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2838 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2839 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2840 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2841 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2842 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002843 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002844 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2845 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2846 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2847 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2848 aligned.)
2849
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002850- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2851 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2852 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2853
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002854- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2855 level.
2856
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002857- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2858 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2859 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2860 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2861 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2862
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002863- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2864 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2865 code.
2866
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002867- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2868 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2869 adjusting for negative indices.
2870
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002871- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2872 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2873 object.
2874
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002875- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2876 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2877 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2878
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002879- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2880 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002881
2882- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2883
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002884- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2885 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2886 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2887 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2888
2889- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2890
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002891- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002892
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002893- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002894 without going through the buffer API.
2895
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002896- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002897
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002898- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2899 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2900 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2901 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2902
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002903- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2904 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2905
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002906- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002907 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2908
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002909New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002910-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002911
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002912- OpenVMS is now supported.
2913
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002914- AtheOS is now supported.
2915
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002916- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2917
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002918- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2919
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002920Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921-----
2922
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002923- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2924 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2925 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002926
2927Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002929
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002930- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2931 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2932 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2933 bugs.
2934 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002935 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002936 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2937 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002938 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002939
2940- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002941 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002942
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002943- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2944 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2945
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002946- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2947 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002948 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002949 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2950
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002951- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2952 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2953 use files" uninstall option).
2954
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002955- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2956
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002957- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2958 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2959
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002960- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2961 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2962 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2963
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002964- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2965 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2966 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2967 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2968 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002969 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2970 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2971 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002972
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002973- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002974 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002975 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2976 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2977 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2978 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2979 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2980 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2981 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2982 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2983 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2984 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2985 work around.
2986
2987- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2988 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2989 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2990 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2991 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2992 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2993 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2994 specified with O_CREAT too).
2995
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002996Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002997----
2998
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002999- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003000
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003001- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3002 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3003 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3004
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003005- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3006 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3007 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3008
3009- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3010 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3011 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3012 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3013 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3014 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3015 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3016 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003017
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003018- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3019 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3020 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003021
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003022- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3023 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3024 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3025 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3026 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003027
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003028- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3029 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3030 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003031
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003032- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3033 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003034
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003035- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3036 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3037 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3038 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3039 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003040
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003041- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3042 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3043 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3044
3045- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3046 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3047 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003048
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003049- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3050 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3051 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3052 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003053 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003054
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003055- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3056 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003057
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003058- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3059 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003060
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003061- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003062 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003063 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3064 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003065
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003066
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003067What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003068===============================
3069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3071
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003072Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003074
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003075- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3076 with a custom metaclass.
3077
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003078Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003079-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003080
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003081- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3082 are proxies.
3083
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003084Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003085-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003086
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003087- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3088 very short strings.
3089
3090- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3091 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3092 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3093 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3094 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3095
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003096Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003098
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003099- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3100 close or delete time).
3101
3102- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3103 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3104
3105- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3106
3107- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003108 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003109
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003110Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003112
3113Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003115
3116C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003118
3119New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003121
3122Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003124
3125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003127
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003128- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3129
3130- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3131 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3132
3133- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3134 deleted at process exit time.
3135
3136- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3137 in backslash.
3138
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003139Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003141
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003142- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3143 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3144 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3145
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003146
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003147What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003148===========================
3149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003154
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003155- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3156 been extensively updated. See
3157
3158 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3159
3160 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3161
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003162- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3163 deleted!
3164
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003165- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3166 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3167 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3168 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3169 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3170
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003171- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3172
3173 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3174 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3175
3176 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3177 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3178 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3179 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3180 supported anyway.
3181
3182 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3183 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3184
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003185- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3186 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3187 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3188 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3189 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003190
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003191- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3192 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3193 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3194
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003195Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003197
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003198- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3199 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3200 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3201 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3202 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3203 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003204 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3205 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3206 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3207 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003208
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003209- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3210 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3211 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3212
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003213Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003215
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003216- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3217
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003218Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003220
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003221- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3222 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3223 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3224 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3225 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3226 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3227
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003228- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3229
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003230- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3231
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003232- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3233
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003234- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3235 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3236 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3237
3238- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3239
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003240Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003242
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003243- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3244 off a search on Google.
3245
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003246Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003247-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003248
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003249- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3250 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3251 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3252 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3253 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3254 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3255 other platforms should do likewise.
3256
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003257- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3258 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3259 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3260
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003261C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003262-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003263
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003264- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3265 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3266 producing key-value pairs.
3267
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003268- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003269 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003270 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3271 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3272 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3273 previously went unchallenged.
3274
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003275New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003277
3278Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003280
3281Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003283
3284Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003286
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003287- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3288 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003289
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003290- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3291 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3292 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3293 home.
3294
3295
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003296What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003297===========================
3298
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3300
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003301Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003303
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003304- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3305 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003306
3307 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003308 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003309
3310 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3311 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003312 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003313 This needs to be documented.
3314
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003315- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3316 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3317
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003318- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3319 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3320 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3321
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003322- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3323 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3324
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003325- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3326 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3327 class forbids it).
3328
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003329- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3330 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3331 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3332
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003333- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3334
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003335Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003337
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003338- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3339 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003340 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003341
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003342- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3343 (like 1 + '').
3344
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003345Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003347
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003348- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3349 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3350 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3351 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003352 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003353 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3354
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003355- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3356 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3357 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3358 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3359
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003360- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3361 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003362 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3363 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3364 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003365
3366- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3367 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003368
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003369- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3370 bytes on its input.
3371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003374
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003375- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003376 convenience function.
3377
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003378- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3379 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3380 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003381 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3382 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3383 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3384 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3385 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3386 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003387
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003388- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3389 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3390 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3391 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3392
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003393- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3394 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3395 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3396
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003397- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3398 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3399 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3400 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3401
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003402- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3403 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003405 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3406 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3407 new -l and -e options.
3408
3409- statcache is now deprecated.
3410
3411- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3412 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003414 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3415 time properly taken into account.
3416
3417- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3418 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3419 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3420 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3421
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003422Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003423-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003424
3425Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003427
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003428- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3429 is built with libdb3 if available.
3430
3431- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3432
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003433C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003435
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003436- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3437 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3438 PySequence_Size().
3439
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003440- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3441
3442- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3443 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3444 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3445
3446- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3447 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3448
3449- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3450 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003452New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003454
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003455- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3456 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3457
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003458- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3459 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3460
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003461- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003463Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003465
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003466- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3467 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3468
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003469Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003471
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003472Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003474
3475- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3476 removed completely in the next release.
3477
3478- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3479 OSX.
3480
3481- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3482 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3483
3484- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3485
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003486
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003487What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003488===========================
3489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3491
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003492Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003494
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003495- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003496 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003497 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003498 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3499 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003500 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3501 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003502 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3503 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003504
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003505- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3506 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3507
3508- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3509 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3510
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003511Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003514- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3515 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3516 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3517 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3518 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3519 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3520 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3521 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3522
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003523- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3524 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3525 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3526 example).
3527
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003528- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003529 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003530 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003531 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003532
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003533- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3534 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3535 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003536 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003537
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003538- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3539 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3540 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3541 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3542 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3543 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3544
3545 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3546
3547 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3548
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003549Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003551
3552- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3553
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003554- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3555
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003556- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3557 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003558
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003559- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3560 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3561 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3562 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3563 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3564 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003565 attributes.
3566
3567- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3568 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3569 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003570
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003571- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3572 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3573 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003574
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003575- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3576 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3577 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003578 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3579 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3580
3581- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3582 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003583
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003584Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003586
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003587- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3588 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3589
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003590- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3591 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3592 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3593 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3594
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003595- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3596 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3597 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3598 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3599
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003600 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3601 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3602 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3603 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3604 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3605 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3606 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3607 without losing information).
3608
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003609- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003610 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3611 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3612 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3613 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3614 module).
3615
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003616 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003617 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3618 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3619 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3620 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003621
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003622- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003623 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3624 encoding.
3625
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003626- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3627 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003630 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3631
3632- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3633 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3634 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3635 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3636
3637- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3638
3639- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3640 ON, and OFF.
3641
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003642- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3643 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3644
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003645Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003647
3648- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3649 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3650 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003651
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003652- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3653 been added: -X and -E.
3654
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003655Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003657
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003658- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3659 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3660
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003661C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003663
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003664- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3665 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3666 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3667 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3668 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3669
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003670- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3671 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3672 as long) arguments.
3673
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003674- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3675 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3676 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3677 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3678 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3679 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3680
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003681- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3682 input.
3683
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003684New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003686
3687Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003689
3690Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003692
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003693- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3694 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3695 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3696
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003697- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3698 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3699 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003700 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3703 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3704 import signal
3705 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003708 while 1:
3709 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003711 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3712 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3713 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3714 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003715
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003716
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003717What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3718===========================
3719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3721
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003722Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003724
3725- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3726 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3727 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3728
3729- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3730 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3731 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3732 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3733 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3734 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3735 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003736
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003737- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003738 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003739 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3740 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3741 associate a docstring with a property.
3742
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003743- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3744 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3745 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3746 other built-in object types.
3747
3748- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3749 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3750 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3751 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3752 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3753
3754- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3755 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3756
3757- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3758 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003759 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003760 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3761 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3762 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3763 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3764 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3765
3766- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3767 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3768 class.
3769
3770- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3771 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3772 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3773 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3774
3775- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3776 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3777 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3778 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3779
3780- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3781 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3782
3783- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3784 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3785 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3786 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3787 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003788 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003789 with the same value as s.
3790
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003791- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3792
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003793Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003795
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003796- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3797
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003798- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3799 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3800 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3801 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3802 objects.
3803
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003804- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3805 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003806 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3807 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3808
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003809- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3810 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3811 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3812
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003813Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003815
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003816- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3817 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3818 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3819 by the instances.
3820
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003821- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3822 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3823 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3824
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003825- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3826 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3827 before the entire comparison is complete.
3828
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003829- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3830 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3831 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3832
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003833- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3834 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3835 getwriter().
3836
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003837- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3838 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3839
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003840- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003841 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3842 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3843
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003844- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3845 iterable object.
3846
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003847- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3848 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003849
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003850- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3851 authentication.
3852
3853- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3854 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003855
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003856- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003857 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3858 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3859 a sample driver.)
3860
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003861Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003863
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003864- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3865 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3866 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3867 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3868 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3869 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3870 kernel has large file support.
3871
3872- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3873 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3874 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3875 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3876 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3877
3878- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3879 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3880 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3881
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003882C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003884
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003885- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3886 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3887
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003888New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003890
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003891- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3892 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3893
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003894Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003896
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003897- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3898 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3899 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3900 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3901 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3902
3903- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3904 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3905 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3906 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3907
3908- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3909 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3910
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003911Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003913
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003914- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003915 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3916 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003917
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003918
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003919What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3920===========================
3921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3923
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003924Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003926
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003927- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3928 big to represent as a C double.
3929
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003930- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3931 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3932 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3933 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3934 restriction).
3935
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003936- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3937 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3938 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3939 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3940 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3941
3942 >>> dir([])
3943 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3944 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3945 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3946 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3947 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3948 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3949 'reverse', 'sort']
3950
3951 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3952
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003953- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003954 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3955 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3956 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3957 OverflowError exception.
3958
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003959- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003960 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003961 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3962 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3963 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3964 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3965 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003966 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3968 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3969
3970 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3971 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3972 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3973 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003975- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003976 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3977 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3978 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3979 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3980 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3981 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3982 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3983 once it is created.
3984
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003985- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3986 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3987 (key, value) pairs.
3988
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003989- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003990 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3991 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3992
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003993- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3994 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3995 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3996 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3997 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003998
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003999- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004000 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4001 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4002
4003 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4004
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004005- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004006 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4007
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004008Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004010
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004011- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004012 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4013 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004014
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004015- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4016 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4017 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4018 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4019 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4020 in this area anymore).
4021
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004022- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4023 threading.Timer.
4024
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004025- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4026 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4027
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004028- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004029 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4030
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004031- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004032 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4033 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4034 converted to Python longs.
4035
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004036- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004037 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4038
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004039- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4040 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4041 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4042
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004043Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004045
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004046- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4047 division operators as per PEP 238.
4048
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004049Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004051
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004052- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4053 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4054 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4055 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4056
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004057C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004059
4060- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004061
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004062- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4063 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004064 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004065
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4067 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004068 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004070
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004071- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004072 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4073 module:
4074
4075 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004076
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004077 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4078 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004079
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004080 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4081 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004082
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004083 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4084
4085 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4086
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004087- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004088 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4089 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4090 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004091
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004092New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004094
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004095- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4096 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4097 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4098 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4099 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004100
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004101Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004103
4104Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004106
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004107- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4108 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4109 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4110 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004111 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4112 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4113 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4114 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4115 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004116
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004117- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004118 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4119
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004120
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004121What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4122===========================
4123
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4125
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004126Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004128
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004129- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4130 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4131
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004132- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4133 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4134 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004135
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004136- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4137 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4138 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4139 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004140
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004141- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004144
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004145Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004147
4148- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004149 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004150 the module docstring for details.
4151
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004152Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004154
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004155- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004156 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4157 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4158 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004159
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004160- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4161 Nick Mathewson.
4162
4163Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004165
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004166- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4167 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4168 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4169 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4170 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4171 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4172 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4173 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4174
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004175- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4176 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4177 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4178 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4179
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004180- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4181 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4182 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4183 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4184 come a long way).
4185
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004186- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4187 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4188 write filters for these warnings).
4189
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004190- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4191 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4192 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4193 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4194 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4195
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004196- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4197 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4198 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4199 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4200 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4201 older distribution.
4202
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004203Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004205
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004206- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4207 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004208 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004209
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004210- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4211 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4212 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4213
4214- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4215
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004216- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4217
4218- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4219
4220- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004223
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004224- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4225
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004226New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004227-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004228
4229C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004231
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004232- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4233 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4234 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4235 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4236 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4237 against buffer overruns.
4238
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004239- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004240 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4241 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004242 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4243 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4244 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4245
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004246- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4247 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4248 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4249 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4250 deprecated.
4251
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004252Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004254
4255- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4256 relevant is found.
4257
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004258
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004259What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004260===========================
4261
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4263
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004264Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004266
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004267- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4268 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4269 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4270 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4271 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4272 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4273 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4274 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004275 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004276 repaired.
4277
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004278- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004279 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004280 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4281 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4282 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4283 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4284 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4285 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4286 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4287 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4288
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004289- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4290 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4291 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4292 leading BMO character).
4293
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004294- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4295 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4296 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4297
4298 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4299 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4300 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004301
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004302 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4303 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4304 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4305 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4306 for various simple to use conversions.
4307
4308 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4309 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4312 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4313 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4314 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4315 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4316 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4317 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4318 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4319 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4320 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4321 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4322 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4323 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4324 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4325 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004326
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004327- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4328 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4329 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004330 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004331 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004332
4333 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004334 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4335 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4336 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4337 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4338 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004339 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4340 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004341
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004342 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4343 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4344 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004345 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004346
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004347- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4348 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4349 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4350 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4351 floating arithmetic,
4352
4353 x = 9007199254740992.0
4354 print long(x)
4355
4356 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4357 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4358 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4359 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4360 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4361 functions are of good quality).
4362
4363 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4364 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4365 algorithms to break.
4366
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004367- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4368 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4369 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4370 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4371 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4372 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4373 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4374 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4375 order.
4376
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004377- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4378 operation along the most common code paths.
4379
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004380- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4381 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4382
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004383- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4384 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4385 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4386 {}.update(UserDict())
4387
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004388- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4389 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4390 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4391 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4392 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4393 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4394 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4395 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4396
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004397- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004398 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004400 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004401 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4402 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004403 join() method of strings
4404 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004405 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4406 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004408 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004409
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004410- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4411 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4412
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004413- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4414 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4415
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004416- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4417 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4418 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4419 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4420
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004421- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4422 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004423 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004424 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4425 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004426
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004427- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4428
4429
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004430Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004432
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004433- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004434 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004435 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4436 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4437
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004438- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4439 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4440
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004441- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4442 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4443 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4444 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4445
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004446- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4447 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4448 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4449
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004450- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4451
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004452- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4453
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004454- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4455 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4456 that are still imported into string.py).
4457
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004458- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4459
4460- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4461 Now it does.
4462
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004463- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4464
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004465- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4466 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4467 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4468 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4469 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004470 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4471 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004472
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004473- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4474 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4475 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4476 'help(object)'.
4477
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004478Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004480
4481- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004482 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004483 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4484 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4485
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004486- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004487 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4488 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004489
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004490C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004492
4493- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4494 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495
4496----
4497
4498**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**