blob: be445c96c0236cd64658f43c3bd60821c6bec874 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000050- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
51 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
52 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
53 supposed to have been truncated away.
54
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000055- Added socket.socketpair().
56
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000057Library
58-------
59
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000060- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
61
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000062- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
63
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000064- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
65
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000066- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
67 Percivall.
68
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000069- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
70 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
71
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000072- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
73 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
74 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000075 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000076
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000077- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
78 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
79 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
80 and exponent.
81
82- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
83
84- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
85 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
86 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
87
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000088- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
89 to the readline module.
90
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000091- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000092 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
93 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000094
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000095- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
96 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
97 contains symlinks.
98
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000099- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
100 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
101
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000102- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
103 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
104 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
105
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000106- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
107 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
108 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
109 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
110 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
111 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
112 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
113 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
114 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
115 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
116 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
117 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
118 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
119
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000120- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
121
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000122Tools/Demos
123-----------
124
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000125- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
126 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
127
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000128- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
129
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000130Build
131-----
132
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000133- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
134 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
135
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000136- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
137 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
138
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000139- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
140 GNU/k*BSD systems.
141
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000142- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
143 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
144
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000145C API
146-----
147
148Documentation
149-------------
150
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000151- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
152 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
153
154- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
155 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
156 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000157
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000158New platforms
159-------------
160
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000161- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
162
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000163Tests
164-----
165
166Windows
167-------
168
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000169- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
170 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
171 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
172 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
173 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
174 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
175 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
176 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
177 the problem.
178
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000179Mac
180---
181
182
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000183What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
184=================================
185
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000186*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000187
188Core and builtins
189-----------------
190
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000191- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
192 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
193 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
194 sensitive code.
195
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000196- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
197 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
198 @staticmethod
199 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000200 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000201
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000202- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
203 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
204 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
205 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
206 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
207 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
208 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
209 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
210 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
211 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
212 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
213
214 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
215 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
216 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
217 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
218 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
219 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
220 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
221
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000222- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
223 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
224
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000225- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000226 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000227
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000228- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000229 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000230 which was missing for no apparent reason.
231
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000232- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000233 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
234 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
235
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000236- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
237 types that support garbage collection.
238
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000239- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
240
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000241- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
242 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
243 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
244 Jython.
245
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000246- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
247
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000248- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
249 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
250
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000251- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
252 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
253 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000254
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000255- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
256 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
257 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
258
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000259Extension modules
260-----------------
261
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000262- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
263
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000264Library
265-------
266
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000267- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
268 TIS-620
269
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000270- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
271 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
272 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
273 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
274 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
275 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
276 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
277 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
278 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
279 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
280
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000281- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
282
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000283- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
284 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
285 same as when the argument is omitted).
286 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
287
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000288- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
289
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000290- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
291 schemes are offered.
292
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000293- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
294
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000295- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
296 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
297 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
298
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000299- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
300
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000301- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
302 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
303
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000304- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
305 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
306 when dummy_threading is being used.
307
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000308- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
309 from a tarfile.
310
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000311- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000312 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000313
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000314- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
315 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
316 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
317 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
318
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000319- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
320 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
321
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000322- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
323 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
324 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
325 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
326 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
327 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
328 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
329 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
330 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
331 by some other method in progress).
332
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000333- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
334 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
335 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000336
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000337- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
338
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000339- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
340 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
341 AM Kuchling.
342
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000343- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
344 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
345 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
346
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000347- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
348 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
349 instead of unsigned.
350
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000351- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000352 no longer part of the public API.
353
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000354- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
355 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
356 string methods of the same name).
357
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000358- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000359 SF patch 945642.
360
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000361- doctest unittest integration improvements:
362
363 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
364
365 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
366 DocTestSuites.
367
368- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
369 that provide thread-local data.
370
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000371- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
372 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
373
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000374- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
375
376- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
377 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
378 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
379
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000380- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
381
382 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
383 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
384 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000385
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000386 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
387 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
388 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
389 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
390
391 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
392 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
393
394 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
395 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
396 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
397 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
398
399 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
400 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
401 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
402 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
403 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
404
405 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
406 wrapping help output.
407
408 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
409 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
410 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000411
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000412C API
413-----
414
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000415- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
416 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
417 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
418 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
419 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
420 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
421 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
422 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
423 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
424 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
425 its visible semantics have not changed.
426
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000427- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
428 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
429
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000430Documentation
431-------------
432
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000433- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000434
435 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000436 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000437
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000438 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000439
440 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
441
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000442- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000443
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000444Tests
445-----
446
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000447- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000448 platforms that use the Makefile.
449
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000450- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
451 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
452 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
453
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000454
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000455What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
456=================================
457
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000458*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000459
460Core and builtins
461-----------------
462
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000463- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
464 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
465 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
466 objects now (one object instead of three).
467
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000468- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
469 Windows DLLs.
470
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000471- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
472 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000473
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000474- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
475 a new .pyc magic.
476
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000477- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
478 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
479 be there.
480
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000481- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
482 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
483 the LC_NUMERIC category.
484
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000485- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
486 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
487 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
488
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000489- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
490
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000491- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
492 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
493 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000494
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000495- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
496 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
497
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000498- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
499
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000500- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000501 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000502
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000503- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
504
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000505- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
506
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000507- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
508 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
509
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000510- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
511 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
512 Fixes bug #858016 .
513
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000514- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
515 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
516 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
517
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000518- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
519 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
520 improves their performance (about 35%).
521
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000522- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
523 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
524 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
525
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000526- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
527 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
528 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
529 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
530
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000531- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
532 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
533 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
534 length is not known).
535
536- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
537 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000538 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
539 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000540 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
541
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000542- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
543 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
544
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000545- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
546 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
547 keyword arguments.
548
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000549- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
550 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
551 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
552
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000553- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
554 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
555 cases.
556
557- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
558 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
559 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
560 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
561 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
562 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
563 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
564 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
565 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
566 a release build.
567
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000568- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
569 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
570
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000571- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000572 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000573
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000574- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
575 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
576 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
577 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
578 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
579 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
580 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
581 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
582 destroyed.
583
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000584- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
585 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
586 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
587 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
588 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
589 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
590 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
591 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
592
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000593- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
594 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
595 character other than a space.
596
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000597- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
598 by the function object or by the method object, the function
599 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
600 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
601 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
602 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
603 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
604 attributes with the same name.
605
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000606- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
607 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
608 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
609 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
610 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
611 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
612 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
613 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
614 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
615 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
616 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
617 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
618 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
619 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000620
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000621- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
622 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
623 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
624 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
625 This has been repaired.
626
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000627- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
628
629- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
630
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000631- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
632 over a sequence.
633
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000634- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000635 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000636
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000637- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
638
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000639- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
640 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
641 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
642 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
643 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
644 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
645 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
646 records with equal keys is unchanged).
647
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000648- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
649 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
650 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
651
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000652- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
653 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
654 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
655 freelist.
656
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000657- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
658 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
659
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000660- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
661 number.
662
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000663- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
664 a TypeError exception.
665
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000666- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
667 820195.
668
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000669- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
670 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
671 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
672
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000673- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000674 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
675 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000676
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000677- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
678 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
679 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
680
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000681- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
682 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000683 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000684
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000685- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000686 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
687 the first call.
688
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000689
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000690Extension modules
691-----------------
692
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000693- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
694 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
695
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000696- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
697 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
698 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
699 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
700 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
701 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
702 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000703
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000704- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
705
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000706- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
707
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000708- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
709 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
710
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000711- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
712 fewer false positives.
713
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000714- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
715 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
716
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000717- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000718 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
719
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000720- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000721 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000722 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
723 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
724 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000725
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000726- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
727 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
728 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
729 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
730
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000731- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
732 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
733 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
734 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
735 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
736 #897625.
737
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000738- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
739 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
740
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000741- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
742 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
743 and pops on either side of the deque.
744
745- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
746 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
747
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000748- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
749 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
750 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
751 other functions that expect a function argument.
752
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000753- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
754
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000755- os.getsid was added.
756
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000757- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
758 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
759 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
760
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000761- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
762
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000763- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
764
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000765- readline.clear_history was added.
766
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000767- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
768
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000769- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
770
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000771- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
772
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000773- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
774
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000775- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
776
777- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
778
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000779- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
780
781- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
782
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000783- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
784 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
785 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
786
787- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
788 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
789 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
790 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
791 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
792 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
793 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
794
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000795- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
796 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
797 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
798 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000799
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000800- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000801 iterators from a single iterable.
802
803- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
804 of raising a TypeError exception.
805
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000806- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
807 as parameter.
808
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000809Library
810-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000811
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000812- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
813 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
814 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000815
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000816- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
817 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
818 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000819
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000820- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000821
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000822- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
823 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000824
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000825- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
826 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
827
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000828- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
829
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000830- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000831 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000832
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000833- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
834 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
835
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000836- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
837
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000838- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
839 on cygwin and mingw32.
840
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000841- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
842
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000843- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
844 module.
845
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000846- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
847 installation scheme for all platforms.
848
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000849- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000850 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000851
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000852- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
853 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
854 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
855
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000856- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
857 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
858 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
859
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000860- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
861
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000862- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
863
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000864- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
865 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
866
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000867- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
868 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
869 type pattern with the same value exists.
870
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000871- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
872 when run from the command prompt).
873
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000874- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
875 not taken into consideration when caching value.
876
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000877- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
878 default sort).
879
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000880- Added global runctx function to profile module
881
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000882- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
883
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000884- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
885
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000886- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
887
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000888- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000889 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
890 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
891 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
892 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
893 accordingly.
894
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000895- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
896 decoding standards.
897
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000898- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
899 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
900 called for all requests.
901
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000902- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
903 they are passed to the compiler.
904
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000905- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
906 indent, width and depth.
907
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000908- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
909 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
910
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000911- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
912 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
913
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000914- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
915
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000916- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
917
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000918- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
919
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000920- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
921 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
922
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000923- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000924 for better performance.
925
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000926- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000927
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000928- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
929 a string).
930
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000931- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
932
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000933- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
934
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000935- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
936
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000937- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
938
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000939- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
940 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
941 list of fieldnames.
942
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000943- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
944 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
945
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000946- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
947
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000948- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
949 empty lists.
950
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000951- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
952 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
953 and shelves.
954
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000955- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
956 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
957
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000958- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000959 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
960 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000961
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000962- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
963 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000964 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000965
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000966- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000967 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
968 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
969
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000970- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
971 and removed in Py2.4.
972
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000973- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
974
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000975- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
976
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000977Tools/Demos
978-----------
979
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000980- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
981 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
982
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000983- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
984
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000985- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
986 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
987 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
988 destination in situations where both files are given.
989
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000990- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
991 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
992 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
993 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
994
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000995- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
996
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000997- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
998 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
999 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1000 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1001 now.
1002
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001003- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1004 in effect
1005
1006- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1007 C-c C-h
1008
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001009- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1010 -d option was given.
1011
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001012Build
1013-----
1014
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001015- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1016 build under OS X.
1017
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001018- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1019 --enable-profiling.
1020
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001021- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1022 is configured --with-tsc.
1023
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001024- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1025 on AMD64.
1026
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001027- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1028 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1029
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001030- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1031 removed.
1032
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001033- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1034 supported (see PEP 11).
1035
1036- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1037
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001038- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1039
1040- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1041 (see PEP 11).
1042
1043- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1044 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1045
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001046C API
1047-----
1048
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001049- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1050 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1051 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1052
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001053- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1054 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1055 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1056 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1057
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001058- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1059 generator objects.
1060
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001061- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1062 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001063 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1064 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001065
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001066- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1067 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1068
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001069- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1070 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1071 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1072 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1073 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1074
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001075- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1076 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1077 about 10% faster.
1078
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001079- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1080 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1081
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001082- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1083 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1084 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1085 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1086
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001087Windows
1088-------
1089
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001090- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1091 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1092 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1093 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1094
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001095- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1096 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1097 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1098
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001099
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001100What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1101===============================
1102
1103*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1104
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001105IDLE
1106----
1107
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001108- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1109 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1110 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1111 context-menu actions.
1112
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001113- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1114 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1115 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1116 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1117 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1118 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1119 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1120 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1121 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1122
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001123
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001124What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1125=============================================
1126
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001127*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001128
1129Core and builtins
1130-----------------
1131
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001132- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001133 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001134 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001136Extension modules
1137-----------------
1138
1139- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1140 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1141 than once. This has been fixed.
1142
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001143- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1144 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1145 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1146 call.
1147
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001148- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1149
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001150Library
1151-------
1152
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001153- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1154 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1155
1156- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1157 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1158 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1159 restored.
1160
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001161IDLE
1162----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001163
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001164- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001165
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001166Build
1167-----
1168
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001169- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1170 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1171
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001172C API
1173-----
1174
1175Windows
1176-------
1177
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001178- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1179 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1180
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001181- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1182
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001183Mac
1184---
1185
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001186- Various fixes to pimp.
1187
1188- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1189
1190- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1191 more problems than it solves.
1192
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001194What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1195=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001196
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001197*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1198
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001199Core and builtins
1200-----------------
1201
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001202- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1203 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1204
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001205- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1206 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001207 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001208
1209- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1210 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1211 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001212 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001213
1214- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1215 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001216
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001217- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1218 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1219 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1220
1221- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001222 770247.
1223
1224- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001225
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001226Extension modules
1227-----------------
1228
1229- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1230 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1231
1232- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1233
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001234- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1235
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001236- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1237 contained within the _strptime module.
1238
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001239- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1240 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1241
1242- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001243 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1244
1245- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1246 the find_class attribute, if present.
1247
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001248- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001249
1250 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1251 (SF bug 763298).
1252
1253 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001254 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1255 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1256 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001257
1258 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1259
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001260Library
1261-------
1262
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001263- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1264
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001265- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1266 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1267 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1268 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1269 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1270 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1271 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1272 or Tester().
1273
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001274- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1275 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1276 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1277 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1278 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1279 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1280 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1281 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1282 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001283
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001284 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001285
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001286- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1287 weren't before was an oversight.
1288
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001289- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1290 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1291
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001292- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1293 when there are no lines.
1294
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001295- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1296 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1297
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001298- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1299 to child processes.
1300
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001301- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1302
1303- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1304
1305- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1306 xmlrpclib.
1307
1308- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1309 responses.
1310
1311- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1312 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1313
1314- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1315 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1316 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1317
1318- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1319 used as patterns.
1320
1321- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1322 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1323 than Tk 8.3.
1324
1325- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1326
1327- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001328
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001329Tools/Demos
1330-----------
1331
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001332- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1333
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001334- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1335
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001336- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001337
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001338Build
1339-----
1340
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001341- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001343- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001345- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1346 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001347
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001348- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1349 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1350 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001351
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001352C API
1353-----
1354
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001355- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1356 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1357
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001358Windows
1359-------
1360
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001361- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1362 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1363 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1364 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1365 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1366 Python exception ::
1367
1368 thread.error: can't start new thread
1369
1370 is raised now.
1371
1372- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1373 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1374 instead of from DLL teardown.
1375
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001376Mac
1377---
1378
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001379- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001380 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001381 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1382 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1383 the executable in the bundle.
1384
1385- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001386
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001387- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1388
1389- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1390 on Panther.
1391
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001392What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1393================================
1394
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001395*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001396
1397Core and builtins
1398-----------------
1399
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001400- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1401 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1402 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1403 with the -i option.
1404
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001405- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1406 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1407
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001408- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1409 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1410
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001411- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1412 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1413 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1414 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1415 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1416 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1417 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1418 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1419 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1420 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1421 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1422 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1423 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001424
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001425- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1426 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1427 embedded in a lambda expression.
1428
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001429- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1430 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1431 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1432 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1433 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1434
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001435- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1436 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1437 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1438
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001439- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1440 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1441
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001442- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1443 It's writable again.
1444
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001445- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1446 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1447 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001448 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001449
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001450- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1451 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1452 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1453
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001454Extension modules
1455-----------------
1456
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001457- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1458 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1459
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001460- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1461 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1462 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1463 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1464
1465- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1466 collection.
1467
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001468- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1469 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1470 unique within a single program run.
1471
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001472- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1473 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1474
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001475- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1476 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1477
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001478- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1479 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001480
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001481- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1482
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001483- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1484 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1485
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001486- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1487 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1488 for many BSD-derived systems.
1489
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001490
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001491Library
1492-------
1493
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001494- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1495 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1496 primary ones:
1497
1498 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1499 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1500 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1501
1502 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1503 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1504 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1505 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1506 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1507 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1508
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001509- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1510 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1511 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1512 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1513 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1514 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1515 argument.
1516
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001517- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1518 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1519 in the archive.
1520
1521- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1522 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1523
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001524- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1525 569574).
1526
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001527- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1528 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1529 no more.
1530
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001531- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1532 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1533 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1534 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1535 code coverage.
1536
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001537- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1538 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1539 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001540 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1541 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001542
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001543- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1544 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1545 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001546 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001547
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001548- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1549
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001550- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1551 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1552 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1553 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1554
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001555- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1556 handling.
1557
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001558- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1559 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1560
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001561- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1562 in socket.py.
1563
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001564- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1565
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001566- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1567 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1568 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1569 opener with proxy support.
1570
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001571- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1572
1573- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1574
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001575Tools/Demos
1576-----------
1577
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001578- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1579
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001580- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1581
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001582- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1583 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001584
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001585- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1586 files.
1587
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001588Build
1589-----
1590
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001591- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001592 different root directory.
1593
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001594C API
1595-----
1596
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001597- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1598 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1599 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1600 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1601 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1602 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1603 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1604 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1605 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1606 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1607
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001608- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1609 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1610 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1611 from Python.
1612
1613
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001614New platforms
1615-------------
1616
1617None this time.
1618
1619Tests
1620-----
1621
1622- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1623 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1624
1625Windows
1626-------
1627
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001628- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1629
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001630- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1631 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1632 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1633 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1634 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1635 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1636 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1637 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1638 that's what it's for.
1639
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001640Mac
1641---
1642
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001643- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1644 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1645 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1646 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001647- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1648 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1649- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001650
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001651SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1652------------------------------------
1653
1654430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1655598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1656622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1657661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1658683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1659697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1660713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1661724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1662727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1663729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1664730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1665731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1666732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1667733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1668735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1669740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1670744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1671745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1672747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1673749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1674751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1675753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1676755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1677757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1678760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1679
1680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001681What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1682================================
1683
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001684*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001685
1686Core and builtins
1687-----------------
1688
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001689- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1690 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1691
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001692- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1693 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1694 and cannot be strings).
1695
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001696- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1697 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1698 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1699 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1700
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001701- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1702 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1703 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1704 Python itself.
1705
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001706- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1707 the referenced object, if it has one.
1708
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001709- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1710 the thread started at
1711 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1712
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001713- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1714 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1715 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1716 placed on a list index.
1717
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001718- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1719 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1720 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1721 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1722
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001723- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1724 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1725 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1726 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1727 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1728 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1729 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1730
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001731- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1732 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1733 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1734 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1735 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1736
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001737- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1738 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001739
1740- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1741 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1742 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1743 #693195.)
1744
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001745- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1746 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001747
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001748- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001749 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001750 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1751 interpreter executions, would fail.
1752
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001753- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001754 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001755 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001756
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001757Extension modules
1758-----------------
1759
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001760- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1761 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1762 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1763 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1764
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001765- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1766 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1767
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001768- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1769 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1770 and Greg Chapman.)
1771
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001772- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1773 recursively.
1774
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001775- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001776 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1777 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1778 leaks.
1779
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001780- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1781
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001782- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1783 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1784 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1785 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1786 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1787 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1788 #705836.
1789
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001790- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001791 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1792
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001793- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1794 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1795 See SF bug #692416.
1796
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001797- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1798 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1799
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001800- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1801 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1802 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001803
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001804- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001805 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1806 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1807
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001808- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1809 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1810 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1811 timeouts to work properly.
1812
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001813Library
1814-------
1815
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001816- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1817 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1818 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1819 future release.
1820
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001821- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1822 for querying platform dependent features.
1823
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001824- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001825
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001826- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1827 pickle protocol versions.
1828
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001829- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1830 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1831 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1832
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001833- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1834
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001835- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1836 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1837 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1838 modules.
1839
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001840- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1841 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1842 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1843
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001844- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1845 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1846
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001847- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1848 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1849 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1850
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001851- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001852 MS Office extensions.
1853
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001854- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1855 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1856
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001857- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1858 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1859
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001860- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1861 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1862 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1863 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1864 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1865 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1866
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001867- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1868 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1869 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001870
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001871- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1872 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1873 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1874
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001875- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1876
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001877- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1878 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1879 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1880
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001881Tools/Demos
1882-----------
1883
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001884- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1885 See the module docstring for details.
1886
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001887Build
1888-----
1889
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001890- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1891 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001892
1893C API
1894-----
1895
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001896- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1897
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001898- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1899 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1900 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1901
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001902- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1903 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001904
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001905 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1906 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1907 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001908
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001909- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001910 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1911
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001912- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1913 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1914 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001915
1916New platforms
1917-------------
1918
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001919None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001920
1921Tests
1922-----
1923
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001924- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1925 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001926
1927Windows
1928-------
1929
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001930- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1931 function.
1932
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001933- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1934 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001935
1936Mac
1937---
1938
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001939- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1940 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001941
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001942- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1943 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001944
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001945- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1946 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1947 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001948
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001949- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001950 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1951 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001952
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001953- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1954 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001955
1956
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001957What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1958=================================
1959
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001960*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001961
1962Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001963-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001964
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001965- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1966 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1967 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1968
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001969- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1970 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1971 (SF patch #664376.)
1972
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001973- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1974 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1975 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1976 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1977 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1978 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001979 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001980
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001981- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1982 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1983 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1984 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001985 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001986
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001987- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1988 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1989 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1990 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1991 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1992 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1993 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1994 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1995 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1996 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1997 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1998
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001999- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2000 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2001 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2002 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2003 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2004 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2005
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002006- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2007 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2008
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002009- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2010 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2011 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2012 case.)
2013
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002014- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2015 passed as unicode strings.
2016
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002017- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2018 See SF bug #683467.
2019
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002020- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2021 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2022
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002023- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2024
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002025- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2026
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002027- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2028 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2029 arguments.
2030
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002031- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2032 See SF bug #667147.
2033
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002034- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002035 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002036 See SF bug #676155.
2037
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002038- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002039 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002040 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2041 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2042 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2043 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2044 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2045 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002046
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002047Extension modules
2048-----------------
2049
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002050- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2051 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2052 tp_as_number pointer.
2053
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002054- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2055 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2056 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2057 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2058 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2059
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002060- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2061
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002062- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2063
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002064- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002065 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002066 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2067 patch #678531.)
2068
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002069- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2070 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2071
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002072- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2073 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2074
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002075- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2076
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002077- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2078 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2079 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2080
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002081- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2082
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002083- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2084 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2085
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002086- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002087
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002088- datetime changes:
2089
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002090 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2091
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002092 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2093 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2094 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2095 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2096 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2097 now.
2098
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002099 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002100 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2101 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002102
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002103 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002104 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002105 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2106 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2107 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2108 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002109
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002110 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2111 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2112 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002113 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2114
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002115 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2116 by a later example coded by Guido.
2117
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002118 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002119 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2120 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2121 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002122 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2123 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2124
2125 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2126 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2127 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2128 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2129 tzinfo subclass instance.
2130
2131 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2132 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2133 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2134 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2135 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2136 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2137 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2138 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002139
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002140 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2141 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2142 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2143 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2144 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002145 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2146
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002147 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002148
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002149 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2150 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2151 as a naive datetime object.
2152
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002153 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2154 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2155 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2156
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002157 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2158 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2159 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2160 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2161 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2162 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2163 comparison.
2164
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002165 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2166 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2167 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2168 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002169 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002170
2171 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002172
2173 and ::
2174
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002175 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2176
2177 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2178 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2179 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2180 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2181
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002182 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2183 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2184 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2185 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2186 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2187
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002188 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2189 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002190 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2191 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002192
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002193Library
2194-------
2195
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002196- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2197 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2198
2199- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2200 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2201 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2202 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2203 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2204 See PEP 307 for details.
2205
2206- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2207 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2208
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002209- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2210 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002211 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002212 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2213 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002214 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002215
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002216- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2217 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2218
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002219- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2220 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2221 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2222
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002223- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2224
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002225- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2226 exception.
2227
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002228- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2229 class.
2230
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002231- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2232 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2233 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2234
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002235- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2236 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2237
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002238- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002239 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2240 See SF bug #659228.
2241
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002242- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2243 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2244 See SF patch #651082.
2245
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002246- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002247
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002248- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2249 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2250
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002251- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002252 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002253
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002254- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2255 DOS paths from other platforms.
2256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002257Tools/Demos
2258-----------
2259
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002260- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2261 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2262 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2263 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2264 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2265 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2266 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2267 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2268 example:
2269
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002270 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2271 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002272
2273 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2274
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002275
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002276Build
2277-----
2278
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002279- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2280 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2281 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002282 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2283
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002284 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2285
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002286- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2287 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2288 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2289 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2290 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2291 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2292 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2293 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2294 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2295
2296- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2297 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2298 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2299 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2300
2301- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2302 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2303
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002304C API
2305-----
2306
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002307- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2308 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002309
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002310- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2311 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2312 tp_as_number pointer.
2313
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002314- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2315 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2316 (SF #681367)
2317
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002318- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2319 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2320 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2321 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002323Tests
2324-----
2325
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002326- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002327 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2328 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2329 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2330 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2331 pydoc.)
2332
2333- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2334
2335- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002336
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002337Windows
2338-------
2339
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002340- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2341 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2342 time).
2343
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002344- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2345 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2346
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002347- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2348 release without strong cryptography.
2349
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002350- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002351 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002352
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002353- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2354 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002356Mac
2357---
2358
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002359- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2360 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002361
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002362- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2363 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2364 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002365
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002366- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2367 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002368
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002369- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2370 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2371 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2372 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002373
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002374- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002375 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2376 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2377 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002378
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002379
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002380What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002381=================================
2382
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002383*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002384
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002385Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002386--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002387
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002388- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2389
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002390- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2391 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002392 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002393 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002394 a different meaning than before.
2395
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002396- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002397 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002398 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002399
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002400- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002401 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002402 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002403
2404- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2405 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2406 and deallocation.
2407
2408- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2409 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2410
2411- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2412 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2413 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2414 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2415 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2416
2417- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2418 now detected by the garbage collector.
2419
2420- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2421 [SF bug 519621]
2422
2423- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2424 identifier.
2425
2426- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2427 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2428 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2429 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2430 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2431 [SF bug 563060]
2432
2433- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2434 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2435 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2436 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2437 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2438
2439- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2440 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2441 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2442
2443- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2444
2445- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2446 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2447 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2448 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2449 state of the slots would be lost.)
2450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002451Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002453
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002454- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002455 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2456 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2457 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2458 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002459 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2460 Jython 2.1.
2461
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002462- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002463 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002464 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2465 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2466 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2467 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2468 these, see PEP 302.
2469
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002470- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2471 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2472 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2473
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002474- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2475 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2476 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2477
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002478- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2479 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2480 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2481
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002482- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2483 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2484 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2485 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2486 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2487 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2488 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2489 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2490 releases or implementations.
2491
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002492- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002493 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2494 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002495
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002496- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2497 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2498
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002499- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2500 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2501 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2502
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002503- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2504 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2505
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002506- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2507 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002508 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2509 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002510
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002511- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2512 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2513 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2514 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2515 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2516
2517 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2518 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2519 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2520 pattern.
2521
2522 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2523 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2524 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2525 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2526
2527 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2528 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2529 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2530 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2531 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2532 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2533
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002534- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2535 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2536 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2537 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2538 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2539 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2540 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2541 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002542
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002543- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2544 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2545 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2546 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2547 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002548 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2549 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2550 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2551 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2552 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2553 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2554 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002555
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002556- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2557 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2558
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002559- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2560 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2561 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2562 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2563 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2564 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2565 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2566 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2567 to Zack Weinberg!
2568
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002569- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2570 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2571 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2572 type. This has been fixed now.
2573
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002574- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2575 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2576 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2577
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002578- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2579 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2580 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2581 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2582 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2583 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2584 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2585 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002586 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002587
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002588- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2589 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2590 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002591
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002592- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2593 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2594 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2595 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2596 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2597 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2598 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2599 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002600 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002601 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2602 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2603
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002604- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2605 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2606 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2607 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2608 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2609 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2610 this.)
2611
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002612- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2613 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002614 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002615 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002616 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2617 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002618 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2619 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002620
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002621- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2622 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2623 currently running.
2624
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002625- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2626 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2627 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2628 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2629
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002630- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2631 as directory names.
2632
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002633- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2634 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2635
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002636- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2637 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2638
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002639- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002640 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2641 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002642
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002643- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2644 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2645 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2646 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2647 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2648
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002649- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2650 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2651 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2652 removed.
2653
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002654- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2655 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2656 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2657
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002658- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2659 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2660 to __debug__.
2661
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002662- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2663 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2664 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2665
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002666- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2667 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2668 deprecated now.
2669
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002670- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2671 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2672 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002673
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002674- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2675 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2676 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2677 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2678 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002679
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002680- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2681 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2682
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002683- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2684 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2685 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002686 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002687 is backward compatible.
2688
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002689- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2690 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2691 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2692 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2693 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2694
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002695- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2696 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2697 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2698 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2699 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2700 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002701
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002702- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2703 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2704
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002705- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2706 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2707
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002708- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2709 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2710 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2711 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2712 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2713
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002714- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2715 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2716 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2717
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002718- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002719 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2720
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002721- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2722 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2723 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002724
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002725- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2726 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2727
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002728- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2729 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2730 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2731
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002732- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002734Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002736
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002737- Added three operators to the operator module:
2738 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2739 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2740 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2741
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002742- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2743
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002744- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2745 archives.
2746
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002747- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2748 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2749 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2750
2751 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2752
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002753- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2754 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2755 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002756 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002757
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002758- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2759 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2760 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2761 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002762 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2763 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2764 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2765 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002766
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002767- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2768 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002769
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002770- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2771
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002772- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2773 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2774
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002775- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2776 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2777 supported.
2778
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002779- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2780
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002781- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2782 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002783
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002784- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2785 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2786
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002787- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2788
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002789- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2790 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2791
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002792- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2793 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2794 functions but callable type objects.
2795
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002796- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002797 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002798 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002799
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002800- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2801 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002802
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002803- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2804 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002805
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002806- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2807 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2808 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2809 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2810
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002811- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2812 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002813
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002814- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2815 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2816 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2817 and __imul__.
2818
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002819- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002820 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2821 is called.
2822
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002823- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2824 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2825 interpreter was compiled.
2826
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002827- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2828 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2829 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002830 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002831 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2832 1, not 2.
2833
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002834- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2835 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2836 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2837 limit.
2838
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002839- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2840 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2841 bug #623464.
2842
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002843- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2844 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2845 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2846 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002850
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002851- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2852
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002853- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2854 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2855 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2856 with Python 2.3a2.
2857
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002858- os.path exposes getctime.
2859
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002860- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002861 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002862 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002863 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002864 unit tests of floating point results.
2865
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002866- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2867 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2868 has been increased.
2869
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002870- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2871 executed.
2872
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002873- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2874 postinstallation script.
2875
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002876- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2877 test the current module.
2878
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002879- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002880 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2881 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2882 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2883 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2884
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002885- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002886 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002887 Ward's Optik package.
2888
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002889- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2890 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2891 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2892 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2893
2894- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2895 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002896 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002897
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002898- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2899 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2900 shelf are binary pickles.
2901
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002902- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2903 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2904
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002905- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2906 modules are iterators now.
2907
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002908- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2909 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2910 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2911 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2912 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2913 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002914
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002915- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2916 with their entity value.
2917
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002918- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2919
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002920- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2921 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002922
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002923- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2924 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002925 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002926
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002927- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2928 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2929 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2930 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2931 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2932 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2933 main():
2934
2935 import locale
2936 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2937
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002938- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2939 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2940
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002941- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2942 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2943 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2944 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2945 to the new standard.
2946
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002947- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2948 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2949 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2950 an extension to the database.
2951
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002952- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2953 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2954 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2955 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002956 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002957
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002958- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002959 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002960
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002961- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2962 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2963 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2964 bounded integers.
2965
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002966- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2967 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2968 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2969 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2970 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2971 in existence.
2972
2973 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2974 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2975 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2976 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2977 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2978 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2979
2980 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2981 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2982 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2983 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2984
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002985- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2986 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2987 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2988
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002989- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2990
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002991- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2992 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2993 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2994 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2995
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002996- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2997 argument.
2998
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002999- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3000 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3001 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3002 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3003 [SF patch 560794].
3004
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003005- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3006 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3007 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003008 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3009 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3010 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003011
3012- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3013 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003014
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003015- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3016 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3017 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3018 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003019
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003020- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3021 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3022 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3023 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3024 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3025
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003026- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003027
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003028- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3029
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003030- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3031 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3032 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3033 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3034 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3035 identical to None.
3036
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003037- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3038 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3039 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3040 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3041 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3042 results now.
3043
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003044- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3045 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3046
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003047- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3048 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3049 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3050 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3051 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3052 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3053 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3054 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3055
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003056- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3057
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003058- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3059 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3060
3061- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3062 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3063 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3064 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3065 and other systems.
3066
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003067- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3068 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3069 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3070 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 +00003071 work well with these.
3072
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003073- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3074
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003075- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003076 connections.
3077
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003078- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3079 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3080 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3081
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003082- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3083 sets
3084
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003085- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3086 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3087 name.
3088
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003089- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3090 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3091 passed in.
3092
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003093- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003094 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003095 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3096 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003097
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003098- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3099
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003100- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3101
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003102- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3103 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3104 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3105
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003106- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3107 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3108 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3109 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003110 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003111
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003112- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003113 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003114 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003115
3116- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3117 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3118 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3119
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003120- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003121 the value of its expression argument.
3122
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003123- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3124 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3125 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3126
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003127- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3128 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3129 skipstone browser was included.
3130
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003131- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3132 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3133
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003134Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003136
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003137- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3138 names in addition to accepting file names.
3139
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003140- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3141 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3142 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3143 still used and useful.)
3144
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003145- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3146 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3147 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3148 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003149
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003150- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3151 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3152 the generated binary.
3153
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003154Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003156
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003157- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3158
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003159- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3160 except in the hands of experts.
3161
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003162- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003163 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3164 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3165 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003166
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003167- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3168 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3169 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3170 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3171 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3172 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3173 builds.
3174
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003175- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3176 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3177 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3178 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3179 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3180 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3181 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3182 new type.
3183
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003184- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003185
3186 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3187 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3188 positive infinities.
3189
3190 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3191 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3192 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3193 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3194 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3195 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3196 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3197
3198 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3199
3200 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3201
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003202- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3203 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3204 size of the executable.
3205
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003206- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3207 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3208 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3209 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003210
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003211- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3212
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003213- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3214 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3215 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003216
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003217- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3218 well as Unix.
3219
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003220- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3221 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3222 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3223 modules in the README file for details.
3224
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003225C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003227
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003228- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3229 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003230 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003231 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003232 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003233
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003234- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3235 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3236 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3237 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3238 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3239 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003240 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003241 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3242 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3243 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3244 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3245 aligned.)
3246
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003247- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3248 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3249 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3250
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003251- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3252 level.
3253
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003254- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3255 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3256 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3257 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3258 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3259
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003260- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3261 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3262 code.
3263
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003264- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3265 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3266 adjusting for negative indices.
3267
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003268- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3269 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3270 object.
3271
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003272- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3273 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3274 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3275
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003276- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3277 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003278
3279- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3280
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003281- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3282 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3283 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3284 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3285
3286- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3287
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003288- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003289
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003290- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003291 without going through the buffer API.
3292
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003294
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003295- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3296 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3297 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3298 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3299
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003300- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3301 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3302
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003303- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003304 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003306New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003308
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003309- OpenVMS is now supported.
3310
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003311- AtheOS is now supported.
3312
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003313- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3314
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003315- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3316
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003317Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318-----
3319
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003320- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3321 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3322 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003323
3324Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003326
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003327- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3328 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3329 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3330 bugs.
3331 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003332 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003333 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3334 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003335 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003336
3337- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003338 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003339
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003340- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3341 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3342
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003343- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3344 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003345 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003346 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3347
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003348- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3349 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3350 use files" uninstall option).
3351
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003352- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3353
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003354- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3355 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3356
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003357- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3358 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3359 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3360
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003361- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3362 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3363 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3364 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3365 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003366 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3367 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3368 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003369
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003370- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003371 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003372 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3373 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3374 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3375 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3376 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3377 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3378 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3379 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3380 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3381 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3382 work around.
3383
3384- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3385 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3386 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3387 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3388 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3389 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3390 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3391 specified with O_CREAT too).
3392
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003393Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394----
3395
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003396- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003397
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003398- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3399 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3400 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3401
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003402- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3403 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3404 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3405
3406- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3407 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3408 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3409 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3410 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3411 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3412 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3413 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003414
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003415- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3416 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3417 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003418
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003419- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3420 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3421 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3422 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3423 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003424
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003425- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3426 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3427 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003428
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003429- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3430 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003431
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003432- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3433 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3434 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3435 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3436 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003438- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3439 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3440 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3441
3442- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3443 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3444 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003445
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003446- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3447 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3448 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3449 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003450 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003451
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003452- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3453 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003454
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003455- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3456 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003457
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003458- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003459 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003460 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3461 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003462
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003463
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003464What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003465===============================
3466
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3468
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003469Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003471
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003472- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3473 with a custom metaclass.
3474
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003475Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003477
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003478- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3479 are proxies.
3480
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003481Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003483
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003484- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3485 very short strings.
3486
3487- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3488 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3489 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3490 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3491 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3492
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003493Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003495
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003496- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3497 close or delete time).
3498
3499- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3500 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3501
3502- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3503
3504- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003505 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003506
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003507Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003508-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003509
3510Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003512
3513C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003515
3516New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003518
3519Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003521
3522Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003525- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3526
3527- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3528 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3529
3530- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3531 deleted at process exit time.
3532
3533- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3534 in backslash.
3535
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003536Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003538
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003539- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3540 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3541 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3542
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003543
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003544What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003545===========================
3546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3548
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003549Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003551
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003552- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3553 been extensively updated. See
3554
3555 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3556
3557 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3558
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003559- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3560 deleted!
3561
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003562- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3563 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3564 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3565 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3566 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3567
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003568- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3569
3570 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3571 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3572
3573 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3574 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3575 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3576 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3577 supported anyway.
3578
3579 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3580 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3581
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003582- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3583 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3584 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3585 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3586 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003587
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003588- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3589 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3590 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3591
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003592Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003594
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003595- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3596 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3597 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3598 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3599 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3600 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003601 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3602 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3603 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3604 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003605
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003606- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3607 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3608 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3609
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003610Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003612
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003613- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3614
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003617
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003618- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3619 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3620 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3621 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3622 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3623 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3624
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003625- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3626
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003627- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3628
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003629- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3630
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003631- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3632 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3633 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3634
3635- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3636
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003637Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003639
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003640- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3641 off a search on Google.
3642
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003643Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003645
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003646- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3647 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3648 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3649 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3650 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3651 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3652 other platforms should do likewise.
3653
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003654- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3655 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3656 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3657
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003658C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003660
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003661- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3662 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3663 producing key-value pairs.
3664
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003665- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003666 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003667 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3668 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3669 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3670 previously went unchallenged.
3671
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003672New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003674
3675Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003677
3678Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003680
3681Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003683
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003684- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3685 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003687- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3688 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3689 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3690 home.
3691
3692
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003693What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003694===========================
3695
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3697
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003698Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003700
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003701- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3702 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003703
3704 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003705 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003706
3707 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3708 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003709 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003710 This needs to be documented.
3711
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003712- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3713 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3714
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003715- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3716 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3717 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3718
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003719- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3720 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3721
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003722- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3723 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3724 class forbids it).
3725
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003726- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3727 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3728 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3729
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003730- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3731
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003732Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003734
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003735- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3736 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003737 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003738
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003739- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3740 (like 1 + '').
3741
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003742Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003744
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003745- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3746 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3747 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3748 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003749 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003750 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3751
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003752- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3753 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3754 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3755 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3756
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003757- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3758 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003759 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3760 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3761 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003762
3763- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3764 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003765
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003766- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3767 bytes on its input.
3768
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003769Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003771
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003772- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003773 convenience function.
3774
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003775- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3776 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3777 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003778 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3779 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3780 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3781 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3782 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3783 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003784
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003785- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3786 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3787 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3788 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3789
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003790- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3791 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3792 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3793
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003794- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3795 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3796 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3797 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3798
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003799- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3800 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003802 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3803 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3804 new -l and -e options.
3805
3806- statcache is now deprecated.
3807
3808- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3809 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003811 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3812 time properly taken into account.
3813
3814- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3815 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3816 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3817 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003819Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003821
3822Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003824
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003825- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3826 is built with libdb3 if available.
3827
3828- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003832
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003833- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3834 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3835 PySequence_Size().
3836
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003837- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3838
3839- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3840 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3841 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3842
3843- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3844 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3845
3846- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3847 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003849New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003851
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003852- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3853 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3854
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003855- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3856 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3857
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003858- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003862
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003863- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3864 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3865
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003866Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003868
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003869Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003871
3872- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3873 removed completely in the next release.
3874
3875- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3876 OSX.
3877
3878- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3879 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3880
3881- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003883
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003884What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003885===========================
3886
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003887*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3888
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003889Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003891
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003892- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003893 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003894 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003895 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3896 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003897 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3898 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003899 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3900 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003901
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003902- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3903 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3904
3905- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3906 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3907
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003908Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003910
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003911- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3912 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3913 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3914 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3915 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3916 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3917 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3918 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3919
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003920- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3921 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3922 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3923 example).
3924
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003925- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003926 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003927 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003928 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003929
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003930- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3931 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3932 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003933 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003934
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003935- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3936 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3937 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3938 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3939 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3940 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3941
3942 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3943
3944 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3945
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003946Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003948
3949- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3950
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003951- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3952
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003953- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3954 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003955
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003956- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3957 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3958 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3959 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3960 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3961 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003962 attributes.
3963
3964- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3965 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3966 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003967
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003968- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3969 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3970 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003971
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003972- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3973 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3974 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003975 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3976 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3977
3978- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3979 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003980
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003981Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003983
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003984- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3985 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3986
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003987- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3988 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3989 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3990 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3991
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003992- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3993 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3994 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3995 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3996
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003997 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3998 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3999 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4000 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4001 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4002 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4003 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4004 without losing information).
4005
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004006- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004007 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4008 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4009 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4010 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4011 module).
4012
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004013 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004014 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4015 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4016 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4017 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004018
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004019- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004020 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4021 encoding.
4022
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004023- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4024 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4025
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004027 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4028
4029- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4030 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4031 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4032 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4033
4034- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4035
4036- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4037 ON, and OFF.
4038
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004039- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4040 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4041
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004042Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004044
4045- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4046 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4047 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004048
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004049- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4050 been added: -X and -E.
4051
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004052Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004053-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004054
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004055- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4056 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4057
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004058C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004060
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004061- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4062 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4063 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4064 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4065 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4066
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004067- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4068 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4069 as long) arguments.
4070
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004071- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4072 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4073 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4074 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4075 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4076 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4077
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004078- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4079 input.
4080
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004081New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004083
4084Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004086
4087Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004089
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004090- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4091 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4092 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4093
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004094- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4095 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4096 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004097 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004098
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4100 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4101 import signal
4102 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004103
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004105 while 1:
4106 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004108 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4109 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4110 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4111 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004112
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004113
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004114What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4115===========================
4116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4118
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004119Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004121
4122- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4123 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4124 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4125
4126- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4127 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4128 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4129 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4130 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4131 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4132 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004133
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004134- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004135 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004136 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4137 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4138 associate a docstring with a property.
4139
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004140- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4141 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4142 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4143 other built-in object types.
4144
4145- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4146 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4147 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4148 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4149 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4150
4151- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4152 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4153
4154- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4155 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004156 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004157 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4158 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4159 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4160 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4161 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4162
4163- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4164 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4165 class.
4166
4167- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4168 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4169 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4170 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4171
4172- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4173 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4174 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4175 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4176
4177- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4178 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4179
4180- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4181 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4182 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4183 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4184 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004185 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004186 with the same value as s.
4187
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004188- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4189
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004190Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004192
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004193- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4194
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004195- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4196 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4197 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4198 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4199 objects.
4200
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004201- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4202 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004203 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4204 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4205
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004206- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4207 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4208 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4209
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004210Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004212
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004213- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4214 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4215 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4216 by the instances.
4217
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004218- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4219 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4220 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4221
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004222- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4223 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4224 before the entire comparison is complete.
4225
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004226- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4227 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4228 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4229
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004230- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4231 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4232 getwriter().
4233
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004234- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4235 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4236
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004237- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004238 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4239 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4240
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004241- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4242 iterable object.
4243
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004244- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4245 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004246
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004247- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4248 authentication.
4249
4250- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4251 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004253- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004254 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4255 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4256 a sample driver.)
4257
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004258Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004260
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004261- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4262 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4263 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4264 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4265 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4266 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4267 kernel has large file support.
4268
4269- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4270 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4271 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4272 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4273 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4274
4275- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4276 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4277 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4278
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004279C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004281
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004282- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4283 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4284
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004285New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004287
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004288- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4289 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4290
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004293
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004294- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4295 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4296 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4297 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4298 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4299
4300- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4301 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4302 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4303 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4304
4305- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4306 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4307
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004308Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004310
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004311- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004312 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4313 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004314
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004315
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004316What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4317===========================
4318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4320
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004321Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004323
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004324- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4325 big to represent as a C double.
4326
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004327- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4328 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4329 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4330 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4331 restriction).
4332
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004333- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4334 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4335 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4336 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4337 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4338
4339 >>> dir([])
4340 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4341 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4342 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4343 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4344 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4345 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4346 'reverse', 'sort']
4347
4348 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4349
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004350- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004351 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4352 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4353 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4354 OverflowError exception.
4355
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004356- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004357 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004358 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4359 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4360 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4361 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4362 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004363 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4365 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4366
4367 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4368 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4369 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4370 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004371
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004372- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004373 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4374 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4375 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4376 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4377 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4378 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4379 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4380 once it is created.
4381
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004382- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4383 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4384 (key, value) pairs.
4385
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004386- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004387 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4388 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4389
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004390- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4391 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4392 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4393 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4394 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004395
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004396- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004397 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4398 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4399
4400 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4401
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004402- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004403 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4404
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004405Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004407
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004408- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004409 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4410 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004411
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004412- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4413 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4414 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4415 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4416 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4417 in this area anymore).
4418
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004419- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4420 threading.Timer.
4421
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004422- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4423 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4424
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004425- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004426 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4427
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004428- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004429 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4430 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4431 converted to Python longs.
4432
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004433- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004434 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4435
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004436- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4437 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4438 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4439
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004440Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004442
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004443- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4444 division operators as per PEP 238.
4445
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004446Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004448
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004449- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4450 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4451 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4452 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4453
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004454C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004456
4457- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004458
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004459- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4460 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004461 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004462
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4464 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004465 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004467
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004468- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004469 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4470 module:
4471
4472 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004473
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004474 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4475 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004476
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004477 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4478 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004479
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004480 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4481
4482 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004484- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004485 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4486 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4487 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004488
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004489New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004491
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004492- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4493 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4494 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4495 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4496 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004497
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004498Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004500
4501Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004503
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004504- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4505 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4506 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4507 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004508 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4509 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4510 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4511 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4512 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004513
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004514- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004515 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4516
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004517
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004518What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4519===========================
4520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4522
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004523Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004525
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004526- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4527 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4528
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004529- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4530 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4531 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004532
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004533- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4534 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4535 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4536 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004537
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004538- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4539
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004541
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004542Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004544
4545- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004546 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004547 the module docstring for details.
4548
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004549Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004551
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004552- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004553 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4554 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4555 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004556
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004557- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4558 Nick Mathewson.
4559
4560Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004562
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004563- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4564 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4565 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4566 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4567 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4568 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4569 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4570 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4571
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004572- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4573 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4574 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4575 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4576
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004577- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4578 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4579 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4580 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4581 come a long way).
4582
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004583- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4584 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4585 write filters for these warnings).
4586
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004587- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4588 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4589 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4590 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4591 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4592
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004593- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4594 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4595 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4596 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4597 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4598 older distribution.
4599
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004600Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004602
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004603- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4604 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004605 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004606
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004607- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4608 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4609 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4610
4611- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4612
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004613- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4614
4615- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4616
4617- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004620
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004621- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4622
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004623New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004625
4626C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004628
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004629- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4630 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4631 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4632 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4633 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4634 against buffer overruns.
4635
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004636- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004637 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4638 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004639 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4640 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4641 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4642
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004643- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4644 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4645 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4646 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4647 deprecated.
4648
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004649Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004651
4652- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4653 relevant is found.
4654
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004655
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004656What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004657===========================
4658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4660
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004661Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004663
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004664- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4665 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4666 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4667 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4668 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4669 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4670 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4671 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004672 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004673 repaired.
4674
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004675- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004676 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004677 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4678 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4679 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4680 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4681 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4682 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4683 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4684 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4685
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004686- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4687 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4688 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4689 leading BMO character).
4690
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004691- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4692 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4693 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4694
4695 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4696 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4697 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004698
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004699 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4700 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4701 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4702 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4703 for various simple to use conversions.
4704
4705 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4706 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4707
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4709 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4710 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4711 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4712 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4713 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4714 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4715 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4716 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4717 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4718 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4719 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4720 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4721 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4722 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004723
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004724- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4725 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4726 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004727 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004728 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004729
4730 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004731 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4732 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4733 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4734 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4735 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004736 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4737 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004738
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004739 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4740 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4741 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004742 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004743
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004744- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4745 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4746 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4747 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4748 floating arithmetic,
4749
4750 x = 9007199254740992.0
4751 print long(x)
4752
4753 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4754 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4755 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4756 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4757 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4758 functions are of good quality).
4759
4760 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4761 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4762 algorithms to break.
4763
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004764- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4765 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4766 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4767 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4768 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4769 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4770 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4771 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4772 order.
4773
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004774- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4775 operation along the most common code paths.
4776
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004777- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4778 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4779
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004780- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4781 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4782 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4783 {}.update(UserDict())
4784
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004785- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4786 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4787 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4788 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4789 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4790 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4791 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4792 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4793
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004794- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004795 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004797 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004798 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4799 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004800 join() method of strings
4801 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004802 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4803 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004805 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004806
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004807- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4808 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4809
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004810- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4811 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4812
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004813- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4814 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4815 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4816 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4817
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004818- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4819 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004820 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004821 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4822 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004823
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004824- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4825
4826
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004827Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004829
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004830- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004831 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004832 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4833 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4834
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004835- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4836 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4837
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004838- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4839 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4840 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4841 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4842
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004843- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4844 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4845 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4846
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004847- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4848
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004849- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4850
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004851- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4852 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4853 that are still imported into string.py).
4854
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004855- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4856
4857- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4858 Now it does.
4859
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004860- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4861
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004862- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4863 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4864 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4865 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4866 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004867 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4868 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004869
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004870- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4871 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4872 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4873 'help(object)'.
4874
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004875Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004877
4878- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004879 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004880 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4881 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4882
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004883- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004884 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4885 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004886
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004887C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004889
4890- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4891 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892
4893----
4894
4895**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**