blob: f15e87390b003f2106a6d93c65012fa7caa98d3a [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000015- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
16 serializing floats.
17
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000018- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
19 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
20 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
21
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000022- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
23 278.
24
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000025- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
26 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
27 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
28 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
29 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
30 PyNumber_*().
31 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
32
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000033- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
34 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
35 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
36 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
37
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000038- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
39 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
40 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
41 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
42 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
43
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000044- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
45 disabled caused a crash.
46
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000047- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
48 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
49
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000050- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
51 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
52
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000053- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
54
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000055- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000056 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
57 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
58 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000059
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000060- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
61
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000062- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
63 returning None.
64
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000065- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
66 ('\') with a specific error message.
67
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000068- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
69
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000070- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
71 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
72
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000073- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000074 an ferror() call.
75
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000076- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
77 list.sort().
78
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000079- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
80 (2+3) --> (5).
81
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000082- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
83
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000084- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
85 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000086
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000087- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
88 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
89 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
90
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000091Extension Modules
92-----------------
93
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +000094- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
95
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +000096- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
97 if available on the platform.
98
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +000099- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
100 available on the platform.
101
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000102- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
103 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
104
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000105- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
106
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000107- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
108 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
109 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
110
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000111- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
112
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000113- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
114 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
115
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000116- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
117 file size.
118
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000119- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
120
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000121- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
122 {remove_history,replace_history}
123
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000124- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
125 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000126
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000127- stat_float_times is now True.
128
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000129- array.array objects are now picklable.
130
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000131- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
132 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
133
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000134- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
135 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
136 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
137
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000138- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
139 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000140
141Library
142-------
143
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000144- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
145
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000146- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
147 component of the path.
148
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000149- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
150 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
151 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
152 class at all.
153
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000154- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
155 files to PyPI.
156
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000157- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
158 them to PyPI.
159
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000160- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
161 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
162 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
163 work as expected.
164
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000165- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
166 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
167
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000168- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
169 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
170
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000171- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
172
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000173- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
174 to build.
175
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000176- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
177 symbolic links on Windows.
178
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000179- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
180 profile.py if available.
181
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000182- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
183
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000184- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
185 in LWPCookieJar.
186
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000187- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
188
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000189- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
190
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000191- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
192
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000193- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
194
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000195- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
196
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000197- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
198
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000199- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
200
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000201- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
202
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000203- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
204 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
205 be exploited in various ways.
206
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000207- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
208
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000209- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
210
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000211- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
212
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000213- Enhancements to the csv module:
214
215 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
216 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
217 PEP 305.
218 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
219 reporting.
220 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
221 dictates.
222 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000223 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000224 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000225 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
226 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000227 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
228 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000229 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000230 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
231 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
232 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
233 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
234 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
235 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
236 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
237 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
238 without first creating a dialect class.
239 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
240 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
241 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000242 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000243 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
244 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000245 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
246 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
247 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
248 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000249 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
250 This has been fixed.
251
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000252- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
253 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
254 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
255 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
256
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000257- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
258
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000259- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
260 (Bug #951915).
261
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000262- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
263 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
264 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
265 encoding alias table
266
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000267- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
268
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000269- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
270 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
271
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000272- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
273
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000274- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
275
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000276- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
277
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000278- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
279
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000280- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
281
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000282- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
283 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
284 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
285
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000286- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000287 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000288
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000289- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
290 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
291 tokenizer with very long source lines.
292
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000293- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
294 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
295
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000296- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
297 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000298
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000299- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
300 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
301
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000302- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
303 correctly.
304
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000305- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
306 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
307 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
308 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
309 between two lines.
310
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000311
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000312Build
313-----
314
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000315- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
316 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
317 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000318 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000319
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000320- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
321 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
322 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
323
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000324- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
325
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000326- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
327 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
328
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000329- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
330 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
331 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
332 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
333 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
334 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
335 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
336 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
337
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000338- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
339 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
340 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
341 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
342
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000343
344C API
345-----
346
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000347- Removed PyRange_New().
348
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000349
350Tests
351-----
352
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000353- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000354
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000355
356Documentation
357-------------
358
359- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
360 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
361 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
362
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000363Mac
364---
365
366
367
368Tools/Demos
369-----------
370
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000371- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000372
373
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000374What's New in Python 2.4 final?
375===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000376
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000377*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000378
379Core and builtins
380-----------------
381
382- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
383 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
384 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
385
386
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000387What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
388==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000389
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000390*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000391
392Core and builtins
393-----------------
394
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000395- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
396 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
397 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
398
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000399
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000400Library
401-------
402
403- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
404 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
405 raised is re-raised.
406
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000407- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
408 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
409
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000410- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
411 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
412 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
413 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
414 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
415 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
416 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
417 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
418 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
419 by the slice are recomputed now.
420
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000421- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000422
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000423Build
424-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000425
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000426- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
427 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
428 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000429
430C API
431-----
432
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000433- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
434
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000435
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000436What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
437================================
438
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000439*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000440
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000441License
442-------
443
444The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
445is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
446changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
447Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
448intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
449durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
450the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
451License::
452
453 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
454
455says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
456to Python 2.1.1.
457
458The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
459License Version 2.
460
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000461Core and builtins
462-----------------
463
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000464- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
465 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
466 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
467 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
468 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
469 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
470 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
471 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
472 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
473 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
474
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000475- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000476
477Extension Modules
478-----------------
479
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000480- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
481 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
482 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
483 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000484
485Library
486-------
487
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000488- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
489 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
490 returned.
491
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000492- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
493
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000494- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
495 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
496
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000497- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
498
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000499- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
500 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000501
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000502- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
503
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000504- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
505
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000506- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000507 the source code is updated and reloaded.
508
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000509Build
510-----
511
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000512- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000513
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000514What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
515================================
516
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000517*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000518
519Core and builtins
520-----------------
521
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000522- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000523 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
524
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000525- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
526 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
527 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
528 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
529
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000530- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
531 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
532
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000533- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
534 constant.
535
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000536- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
537 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
538 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
539 large), and to anomalies such as
540 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
541 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
542 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
543 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000544
545Extension modules
546-----------------
547
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000548- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
549 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000550 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
551 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
552 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000553
554Library
555-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000556
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000557- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000558 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000559 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
560 --swig-cpp.
561
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000562- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
563 it is set.
564
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000565- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000566
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000567- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
568 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
569 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
570 Closes bug #1039270.
571
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000572- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000573
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000574 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000575 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
576 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
577 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
578 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
579 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
580 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
581 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
582 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
583 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
584 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
585 + Updates to documentation.
586
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000587- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
588 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
589 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
590 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
591
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000592- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000593
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000594- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
595 applications should use the getmember function.
596
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000597- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
598
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000599- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
600 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
601 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
602 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
603 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
604 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
605 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
606 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
607 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
608
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000609- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
610 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000611 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000612
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000613- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
614 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
615 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
616 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
617 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
618 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
619 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
620 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000621
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000622- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
623 the new public features (of which there are many).
624
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000625- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000626 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
627 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
628 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
629 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000630 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000631
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000632- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
633
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000634- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
635 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
636 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
637 options.
638
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000639- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
640 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
641 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
642 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
643 conditions under which non-string values work.
644
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000645Build
646-----
647
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000648- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
649 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
650 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
651
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000652- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
653 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
654 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
655 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
656 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000657
658C API
659-----
660
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000661- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
662 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
663
664- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
665
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000666- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
667 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
668 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
669 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
670 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
671 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
672 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
673 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
674 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
675
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000676- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
677
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000678- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
679 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
680 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000681
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000682Tests
683-----
684
685- test__locale ported to unittest
686
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000687Mac
688---
689
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000690- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
691 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
692 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000693
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000694Tools/Demos
695-----------
696
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000697- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
698 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
699 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
700 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
701 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000702
703
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000704What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
705=================================
706
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000707*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000708
709Core and builtins
710-----------------
711
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000712- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000713 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
714
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000715- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
716 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
717 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
718 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
719 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
720 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
721 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
722 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000723 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
724 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
725 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
726 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
727 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000728
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000729- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
730 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
731 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
732 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
733 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
734
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000735- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
736
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000737- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
738 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
739
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000740- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
741 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
742 modified the list.
743
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000744- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
745 functions is now writable.
746
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000747- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
748 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
749 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
750 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
751
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000752- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
753 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
754 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
755 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
756 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000757
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000758- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
759 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
760
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000761Extension modules
762-----------------
763
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000764- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
765
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000766- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
767 data.
768
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000769- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
770 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
771 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
772 supposed to have been truncated away.
773
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000774- Added socket.socketpair().
775
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000776- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
777 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
778
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000779- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000780 versions of Python, have now been removed.
781
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000782Library
783-------
784
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000785- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000786 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000787
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000788- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
789 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
790
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000791- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
792 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
793
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000794- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
795
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000796- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
797 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000798
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000799- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
800 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
801
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000802- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
803
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000804- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
805
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000806- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
807
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000808- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
809 Percivall.
810
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000811- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
812 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
813
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000814- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
815 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
816 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000817 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000818
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000819- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
820 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
821 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
822 and exponent.
823
824- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
825
826- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
827 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
828 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
829
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000830- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
831 to the readline module.
832
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000833- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000834 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
835 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000836
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000837- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
838 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
839 contains symlinks.
840
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000841- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
842 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
843
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000844- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
845 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
846 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
847
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000848- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
849 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
850 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
851 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
852 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
853 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
854 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
855 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
856 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
857 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
858 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
859 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
860 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
861
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000862- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
863
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000864Tools/Demos
865-----------
866
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000867- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
868 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
869
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000870- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
871
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000872Build
873-----
874
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000875- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
876 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
877 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
878 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
879 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
880 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
881 plans to do so.
882
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000883- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
884 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
885
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000886- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
887 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
888
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000889- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
890 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
891
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000892- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
893 GNU/k*BSD systems.
894
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000895- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
896 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
897
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000898C API
899-----
900
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000901..
902
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000903Documentation
904-------------
905
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000906- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
907 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
908
909- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
910 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
911 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000912
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000913New platforms
914-------------
915
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000916- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
917
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000918Tests
919-----
920
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000921..
922
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000923Windows
924-------
925
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000926- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
927 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
928 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
929 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
930 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
931 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
932 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
933 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
934 the problem.
935
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000936Mac
937---
938
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000939..
940
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000941
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000942What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
943=================================
944
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000945*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000946
947Core and builtins
948-----------------
949
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000950- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
951 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
952 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
953 sensitive code.
954
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000955- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000956 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000957
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000958 @staticmethod
959 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000960
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000961 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000962
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000963- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
964 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
965 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
966 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
967 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
968 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
969 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
970 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
971 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
972 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
973 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
974
975 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
976 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
977 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
978 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
979 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
980 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
981 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
982
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000983- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
984 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
985
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000986- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000987 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000988
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000989- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000990 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000991 which was missing for no apparent reason.
992
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000993- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000994 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
995 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
996
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000997- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
998 types that support garbage collection.
999
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001000- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1001
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001002- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1003 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1004 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1005 Jython.
1006
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001007- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1008
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001009- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1010 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1011
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001012- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1013 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1014 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001015
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001016- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1017 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1018 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1019
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001020Extension modules
1021-----------------
1022
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001023- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1024
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001025Library
1026-------
1027
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001028- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1029 TIS-620
1030
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001031- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1032 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1033 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1034 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1035 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1036 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1037 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1038 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1039 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1040 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1041
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001042- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1043
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001044- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1045 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1046 same as when the argument is omitted).
1047 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1048
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001049- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1050
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001051- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1052 schemes are offered.
1053
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001054- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1055
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001056- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1057 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1058 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1059
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001060- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1061
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001062- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1063 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1064
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001065- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1066 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1067 when dummy_threading is being used.
1068
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001069- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1070 from a tarfile.
1071
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001072- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001073 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001074
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001075- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1076 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1077 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1078 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1079
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001080- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1081 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1082
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001083- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1084 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1085 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1086 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1087 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1088 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1089 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1090 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1091 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1092 by some other method in progress).
1093
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001094- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1095 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1096 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001097
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001098- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1099
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001100- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1101 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1102 AM Kuchling.
1103
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001104- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1105 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1106 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1107
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001108- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1109 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1110 instead of unsigned.
1111
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001112- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001113 no longer part of the public API.
1114
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001115- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1116 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1117 string methods of the same name).
1118
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001119- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001120 SF patch 945642.
1121
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001122- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1123
1124 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1125
1126 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1127 DocTestSuites.
1128
1129- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1130 that provide thread-local data.
1131
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001132- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1133 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1134
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001135- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1136
1137- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1138 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1139 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1140
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001141- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1142
1143 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1144 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1145 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001146
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001147 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1148 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1149 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1150 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1151
1152 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1153 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1154
1155 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1156 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1157 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1158 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1159
1160 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1161 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1162 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1163 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1164 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1165
1166 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1167 wrapping help output.
1168
1169 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1170 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1171 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001172
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001173C API
1174-----
1175
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001176- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1177 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1178 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1179 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1180 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1181 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1182 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1183 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1184 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1185 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1186 its visible semantics have not changed.
1187
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001188- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1189 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1190
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001191Documentation
1192-------------
1193
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001194- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001195
1196 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001197 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001198
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001199 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001200
1201 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1202
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001203- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001204
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001205Tests
1206-----
1207
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001208- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001209 platforms that use the Makefile.
1210
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001211- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1212 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1213 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1214
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001215
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001216What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1217=================================
1218
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001219*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001220
1221Core and builtins
1222-----------------
1223
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001224- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1225 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1226 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1227 objects now (one object instead of three).
1228
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001229- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1230 Windows DLLs.
1231
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001232- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1233 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001234
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001235- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1236 a new .pyc magic.
1237
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001238- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1239 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1240 be there.
1241
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001242- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1243 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1244 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1245
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001246- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1247 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1248 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1249
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001250- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1251
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001252- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1253 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1254 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001255
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001256- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1257 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1258
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001259- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1260
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001261- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001262 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001263
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001264- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1265
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001266- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1267
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001268- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1269 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1270
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001271- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1272 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1273 Fixes bug #858016 .
1274
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001275- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1276 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1277 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1278
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001279- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1280 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1281 improves their performance (about 35%).
1282
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001283- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1284 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1285 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1286
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001287- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1288 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1289 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1290 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1291
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001292- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1293 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001294 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001295 length is not known).
1296
1297- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1298 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001299 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1300 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001301 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1302
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001303- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1304 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1305
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001306- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1307 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1308 keyword arguments.
1309
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001310- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1311 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1312 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1313
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001314- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1315 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1316 cases.
1317
1318- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1319 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1320 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1321 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1322 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1323 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1324 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1325 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1326 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1327 a release build.
1328
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001329- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1330 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1331
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001332- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001333 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001334
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001335- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1336 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1337 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1338 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1339 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1340 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1341 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1342 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1343 destroyed.
1344
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001345- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1346 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1347 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1348 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1349 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1350 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1351 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1352 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1353
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001354- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1355 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1356 character other than a space.
1357
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001358- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1359 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1360 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1361 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1362 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1363 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1364 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1365 attributes with the same name.
1366
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001367- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1368 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1369 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1370 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1371 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1372 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1373 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1374 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1375 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1376 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1377 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1378 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1379 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1380 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001381
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001382- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1383 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1384 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1385 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1386 This has been repaired.
1387
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001388- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1389
1390- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1391
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001392- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1393 over a sequence.
1394
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001395- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001396 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001397
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001398- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1399
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001400- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1401 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1402 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1403 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1404 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1405 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1406 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1407 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1408
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001409- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1410 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1411 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1412
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001413- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1414 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1415 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1416 freelist.
1417
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001418- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1419 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1420
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001421- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1422 number.
1423
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001424- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1425 a TypeError exception.
1426
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001427- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1428 820195.
1429
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001430- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1431 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1432 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1433
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001434- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001435 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1436 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001437
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001438- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1439 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1440 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1441
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001442- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1443 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001444 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001445
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001446- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001447 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1448 the first call.
1449
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001450
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001451Extension modules
1452-----------------
1453
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001454- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1455 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1456
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001457- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1458 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1459 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1460 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1461 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1462 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1463 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001464
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001465- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1466
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001467- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1468
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001469- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1470 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1471
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001472- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1473 fewer false positives.
1474
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001475- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1476 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1477
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001478- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001479 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1480
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001481- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001482 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001483 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001484 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1485 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001486
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001487- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1488 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1489 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1490 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1491
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001492- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1493 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1494 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1495 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1496 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1497 #897625.
1498
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001499- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1500 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1501
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001502- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1503 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1504 and pops on either side of the deque.
1505
1506- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1507 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1508
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001509- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1510 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1511 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1512 other functions that expect a function argument.
1513
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001514- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1515
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001516- os.getsid was added.
1517
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001518- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1519 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1520 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1521
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001522- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1523
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001524- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1525
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001526- readline.clear_history was added.
1527
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001528- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1529
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001530- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1531
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001532- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1533
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001534- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1535
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001536- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1537
1538- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1539
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001540- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1541
1542- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1543
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001544- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1545 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1546 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1547
1548- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1549 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1550 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1551 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1552 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1553 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1554 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1555
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001556- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1557 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1558 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1559 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001560
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001561- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001562 iterators from a single iterable.
1563
1564- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1565 of raising a TypeError exception.
1566
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001567- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1568 as parameter.
1569
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001570Library
1571-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001572
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001573- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1574 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1575 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001576
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001577- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1578 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1579 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001580
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001581- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001582
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001583- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1584 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001585
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001586- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1587 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1588
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001589- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1590
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001591- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001592 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001593
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001594- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001595 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001596
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001597- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1598
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001599- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1600 on cygwin and mingw32.
1601
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001602- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1603
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001604- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1605 module.
1606
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001607- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1608 installation scheme for all platforms.
1609
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001610- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001611 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001612
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001613- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1614 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1615 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1616
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001617- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1618 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1619 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1620
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001621- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1622
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001623- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1624
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001625- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1626 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1627
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001628- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1629 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1630 type pattern with the same value exists.
1631
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001632- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1633 when run from the command prompt).
1634
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001635- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1636 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1637
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001638- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1639 default sort).
1640
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001641- Added global runctx function to profile module
1642
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001643- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1644
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001645- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1646
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001647- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1648
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001649- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001650 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1651 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1652 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1653 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1654 accordingly.
1655
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001656- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1657 decoding standards.
1658
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001659- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1660 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1661 called for all requests.
1662
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001663- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1664 they are passed to the compiler.
1665
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001666- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1667 indent, width and depth.
1668
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001669- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1670 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1671
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001672- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1673 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1674
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001675- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1676
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001677- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1678
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001679- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1680
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001681- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1682 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1683
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001684- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001685 for better performance.
1686
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001687- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001688
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001689- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1690 a string).
1691
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001692- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1693
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001694- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1695
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001696- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1697
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001698- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1699
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001700- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1701 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1702 list of fieldnames.
1703
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001704- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1705 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1706
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001707- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1708
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001709- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1710 empty lists.
1711
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001712- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1713 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1714 and shelves.
1715
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001716- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1717 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1718
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001719- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001720 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1721 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001722
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001723- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1724 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001725 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001726
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001727- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001728 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1729 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1730
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001731- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1732 and removed in Py2.4.
1733
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001734- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1735
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001736- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1737
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001738Tools/Demos
1739-----------
1740
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001741- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1742 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1743
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001744- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1745
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001746- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1747 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1748 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1749 destination in situations where both files are given.
1750
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001751- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1752 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1753 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1754 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1755
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001756- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1757
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001758- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1759 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1760 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1761 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1762 now.
1763
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001764- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1765 in effect
1766
1767- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1768 C-c C-h
1769
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001770- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1771 -d option was given.
1772
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001773Build
1774-----
1775
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001776- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1777 build under OS X.
1778
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001779- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1780 --enable-profiling.
1781
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001782- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1783 is configured --with-tsc.
1784
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001785- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1786 on AMD64.
1787
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001788- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1789 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1790
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001791- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1792 removed.
1793
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001794- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1795 supported (see PEP 11).
1796
1797- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1798
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001799- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1800
1801- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1802 (see PEP 11).
1803
1804- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1805 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1806
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001807C API
1808-----
1809
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001810- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1811 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1812 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1813
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001814- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1815 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1816 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1817 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1818
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001819- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1820 generator objects.
1821
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001822- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1823 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001824 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1825 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001826
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001827- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1828 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1829
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001830- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1831 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1832 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1833 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1834 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1835
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001836- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1837 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1838 about 10% faster.
1839
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001840- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1841 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1842
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001843- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1844 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1845 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1846 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1847
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001848Windows
1849-------
1850
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001851- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1852 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1853 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1854 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1855
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001856- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1857 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1858 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1859
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001860
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001861What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1862===============================
1863
1864*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1865
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001866IDLE
1867----
1868
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001869- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1870 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1871 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1872 context-menu actions.
1873
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001874- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1875 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1876 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1877 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1878 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1879 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1880 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1881 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1882 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1883
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001884
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001885What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1886=============================================
1887
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001888*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001889
1890Core and builtins
1891-----------------
1892
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001893- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001894 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001895 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1896
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001897Extension modules
1898-----------------
1899
1900- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1901 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1902 than once. This has been fixed.
1903
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001904- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1905 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1906 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1907 call.
1908
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001909- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1910
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001911Library
1912-------
1913
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001914- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1915 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1916
1917- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1918 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1919 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1920 restored.
1921
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001922IDLE
1923----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001924
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001925- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001926
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001927Build
1928-----
1929
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001930- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1931 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1932
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001933C API
1934-----
1935
1936Windows
1937-------
1938
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001939- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1940 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1941
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001942- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1943
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001944Mac
1945---
1946
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001947- Various fixes to pimp.
1948
1949- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1950
1951- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1952 more problems than it solves.
1953
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001954
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001955What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1956=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001957
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001958*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1959
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001960Core and builtins
1961-----------------
1962
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001963- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1964 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1965
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001966- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1967 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001968 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001969
1970- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1971 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1972 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001973 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001974
1975- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1976 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001977
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001978- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1979 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1980 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1981
1982- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001983 770247.
1984
1985- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001986
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001987Extension modules
1988-----------------
1989
1990- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1991 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1992
1993- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1994
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001995- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1996
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001997- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1998 contained within the _strptime module.
1999
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002000- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2001 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2002
2003- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002004 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2005
2006- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2007 the find_class attribute, if present.
2008
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002009- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002010
2011 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2012 (SF bug 763298).
2013
2014 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002015 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2016 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2017 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002018
2019 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2020
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002021Library
2022-------
2023
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002024- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2025
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002026- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2027 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2028 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2029 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2030 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2031 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2032 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2033 or Tester().
2034
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002035- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2036 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2037 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2038 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2039 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2040 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2041 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2042 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2043 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002044
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002045 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002046
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002047- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2048 weren't before was an oversight.
2049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002050- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2051 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2052
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002053- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2054 when there are no lines.
2055
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002056- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2057 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2058
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002059- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2060 to child processes.
2061
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002062- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2063
2064- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2065
2066- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2067 xmlrpclib.
2068
2069- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2070 responses.
2071
2072- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2073 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2074
2075- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2076 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2077 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2078
2079- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2080 used as patterns.
2081
2082- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2083 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2084 than Tk 8.3.
2085
2086- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2087
2088- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002089
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002090Tools/Demos
2091-----------
2092
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002093- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2094
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002095- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2096
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002097- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002098
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002099Build
2100-----
2101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002102- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2103
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002104- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2105
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002106- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2107 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002108
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002109- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2110 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2111 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002112
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002113C API
2114-----
2115
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002116- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2117 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2118
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002119Windows
2120-------
2121
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002122- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2123 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2124 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2125 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2126 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2127 Python exception ::
2128
2129 thread.error: can't start new thread
2130
2131 is raised now.
2132
2133- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2134 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2135 instead of from DLL teardown.
2136
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002137Mac
2138---
2139
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002140- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002141 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002142 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2143 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2144 the executable in the bundle.
2145
2146- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002147
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002148- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2149
2150- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2151 on Panther.
2152
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002153What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2154================================
2155
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002156*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002157
2158Core and builtins
2159-----------------
2160
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002161- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2162 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2163 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2164 with the -i option.
2165
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002166- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2167 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2168
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002169- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2170 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2171
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002172- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2173 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2174 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2175 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2176 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2177 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2178 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2179 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2180 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2181 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2182 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2183 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2184 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002185
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002186- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2187 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2188 embedded in a lambda expression.
2189
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002190- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2191 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2192 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2193 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2194 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2195
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002196- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2197 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2198 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2199
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002200- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2201 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2202
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002203- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2204 It's writable again.
2205
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002206- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2207 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2208 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002209 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002210
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002211- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2212 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2213 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2214
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002215Extension modules
2216-----------------
2217
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002218- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2219 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2220
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002221- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2222 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2223 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2224 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2225
2226- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2227 collection.
2228
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002229- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2230 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2231 unique within a single program run.
2232
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002233- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2234 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2235
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002236- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2237 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2238
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002239- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2240 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002241
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002242- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2243
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002244- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2245 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2246
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002247- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2248 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2249 for many BSD-derived systems.
2250
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002251
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252Library
2253-------
2254
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002255- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2256 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2257 primary ones:
2258
2259 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2260 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2261 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2262
2263 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2264 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2265 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2266 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2267 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2268 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2269
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002270- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2271 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2272 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2273 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2274 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2275 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2276 argument.
2277
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002278- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2279 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2280 in the archive.
2281
2282- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2283 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2284
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002285- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2286 569574).
2287
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002288- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2289 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2290 no more.
2291
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002292- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2293 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2294 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2295 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2296 code coverage.
2297
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002298- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2299 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2300 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002301 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2302 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002303
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002304- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2305 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2306 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002307 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002308
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002309- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2310
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002311- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2312 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2313 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2314 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2315
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002316- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2317 handling.
2318
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002319- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2320 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2321
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002322- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2323 in socket.py.
2324
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002325- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2326
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002327- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2328 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2329 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2330 opener with proxy support.
2331
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002332- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2333
2334- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2335
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002336Tools/Demos
2337-----------
2338
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002339- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2340
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002341- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2342
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002343- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2344 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002345
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002346- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2347 files.
2348
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002349Build
2350-----
2351
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002352- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002353 different root directory.
2354
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002355C API
2356-----
2357
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002358- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2359 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2360 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2361 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2362 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2363 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2364 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2365 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2366 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2367 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2368
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002369- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2370 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2371 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2372 from Python.
2373
2374
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002375New platforms
2376-------------
2377
2378None this time.
2379
2380Tests
2381-----
2382
2383- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2384 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2385
2386Windows
2387-------
2388
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002389- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2390
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002391- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2392 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2393 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2394 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2395 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2396 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2397 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2398 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2399 that's what it's for.
2400
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002401Mac
2402---
2403
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002404- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2405 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2406 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2407 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002408- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2409 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2410- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002411
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002412SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2413------------------------------------
2414
2415430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2416598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2417622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2418661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2419683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2420697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2421713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2422724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2423727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2424729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2425730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2426731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2427732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2428733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2429735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2430740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2431744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2432745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2433747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2434749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2435751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2436753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2437755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2438757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2439760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2440
2441
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002442What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2443================================
2444
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002445*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002446
2447Core and builtins
2448-----------------
2449
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002450- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2451 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2452
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002453- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2454 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2455 and cannot be strings).
2456
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002457- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2458 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2459 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2460 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2461
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002462- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2463 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2464 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2465 Python itself.
2466
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002467- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2468 the referenced object, if it has one.
2469
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002470- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2471 the thread started at
2472 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2473
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002474- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2475 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2476 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2477 placed on a list index.
2478
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002479- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2480 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2481 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2482 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2483
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002484- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2485 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2486 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2487 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2488 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2489 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2490 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2491
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002492- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2493 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2494 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2495 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2496 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2497
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002498- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2499 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002500
2501- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2502 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2503 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2504 #693195.)
2505
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002506- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2507 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002508
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002509- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002510 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002511 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2512 interpreter executions, would fail.
2513
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002514- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002515 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002516 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002517
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002518Extension modules
2519-----------------
2520
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002521- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2522 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2523 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2524 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2525
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002526- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2527 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2528
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002529- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2530 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2531 and Greg Chapman.)
2532
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002533- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2534 recursively.
2535
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002536- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002537 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2538 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2539 leaks.
2540
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002541- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2542
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002543- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2544 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2545 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2546 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2547 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2548 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2549 #705836.
2550
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002551- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002552 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2553
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002554- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2555 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2556 See SF bug #692416.
2557
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002558- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2559 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2560
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002561- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2562 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2563 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002564
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002565- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002566 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2567 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2568
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002569- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2570 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2571 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2572 timeouts to work properly.
2573
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002574Library
2575-------
2576
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002577- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2578 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2579 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2580 future release.
2581
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002582- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2583 for querying platform dependent features.
2584
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002585- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002586
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002587- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2588 pickle protocol versions.
2589
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002590- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2591 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2592 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2593
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002594- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2595
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002596- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2597 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2598 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2599 modules.
2600
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002601- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2602 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2603 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2604
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002605- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2606 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2607
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002608- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2609 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2610 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2611
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002612- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002613 MS Office extensions.
2614
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002615- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2616 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2617
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002618- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2619 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2620
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002621- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2622 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2623 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2624 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2625 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2626 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2627
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002628- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2629 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2630 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002631
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002632- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2633 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2634 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2635
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002636- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2637
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002638- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2639 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2640 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2641
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002642Tools/Demos
2643-----------
2644
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002645- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2646 See the module docstring for details.
2647
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002648Build
2649-----
2650
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002651- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2652 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002653
2654C API
2655-----
2656
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002657- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2658
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002659- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2660 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2661 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2662
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002663- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2664 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002665
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002666 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2667 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2668 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002669
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002670- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002671 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2672
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002673- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2674 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2675 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002676
2677New platforms
2678-------------
2679
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002680None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002681
2682Tests
2683-----
2684
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002685- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2686 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002687
2688Windows
2689-------
2690
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002691- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2692 function.
2693
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002694- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2695 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002696
2697Mac
2698---
2699
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002700- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2701 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002702
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002703- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2704 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002705
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002706- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2707 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2708 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002709
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002710- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002711 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2712 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002713
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002714- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2715 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002716
2717
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002718What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2719=================================
2720
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002721*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002722
2723Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002724-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002725
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002726- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2727 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2728 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2729
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002730- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2731 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2732 (SF patch #664376.)
2733
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002734- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2735 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2736 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2737 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2738 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2739 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002740 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002741
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002742- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2743 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2744 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2745 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002746 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002747
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002748- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2749 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2750 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2751 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2752 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2753 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2754 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2755 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2756 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2757 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2758 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2759
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002760- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2761 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2762 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2763 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2764 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2765 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2766
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002767- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2768 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2769
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002770- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2771 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2772 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2773 case.)
2774
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002775- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2776 passed as unicode strings.
2777
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002778- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2779 See SF bug #683467.
2780
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002781- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2782 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2783
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002784- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2785
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002786- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2787
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002788- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2789 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2790 arguments.
2791
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002792- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2793 See SF bug #667147.
2794
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002795- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002796 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002797 See SF bug #676155.
2798
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002799- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002800 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002801 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2802 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2803 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2804 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2805 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2806 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002807
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002808Extension modules
2809-----------------
2810
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002811- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2812 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2813 tp_as_number pointer.
2814
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002815- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2816 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2817 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2818 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2819 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2820
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002821- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2822
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002823- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2824
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002825- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002826 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002827 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2828 patch #678531.)
2829
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002830- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2831 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2832
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002833- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2834 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2835
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002836- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2837
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002838- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2839 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2840 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2841
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002842- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2843
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002844- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2845 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2846
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002847- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002848
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002849- datetime changes:
2850
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002851 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2852
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002853 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2854 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2855 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2856 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2857 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2858 now.
2859
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002860 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002861 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2862 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002863
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002864 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002865 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002866 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2867 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2868 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2869 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002870
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002871 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2872 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2873 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002874 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2875
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002876 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2877 by a later example coded by Guido.
2878
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002879 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002880 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2881 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2882 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002883 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2884 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2885
2886 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2887 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2888 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2889 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2890 tzinfo subclass instance.
2891
2892 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2893 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2894 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2895 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2896 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2897 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2898 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2899 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002900
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002901 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2902 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2903 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2904 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2905 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002906 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2907
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002908 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002909
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002910 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2911 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2912 as a naive datetime object.
2913
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002914 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2915 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2916 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2917
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002918 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2919 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2920 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2921 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2922 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2923 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2924 comparison.
2925
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002926 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2927 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2928 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2929 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002930 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002931
2932 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002933
2934 and ::
2935
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002936 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2937
2938 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2939 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2940 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2941 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2942
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002943 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2944 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2945 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2946 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2947 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2948
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002949 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2950 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002951 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2952 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002953
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002954Library
2955-------
2956
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002957- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2958 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2959
2960- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2961 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2962 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2963 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2964 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2965 See PEP 307 for details.
2966
2967- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2968 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2969
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002970- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2971 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002972 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002973 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2974 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002975 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002976
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002977- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2978 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2979
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002980- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2981 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2982 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2983
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002984- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2985
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002986- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2987 exception.
2988
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002989- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2990 class.
2991
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002992- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2993 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2994 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2995
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002996- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2997 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2998
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002999- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003000 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3001 See SF bug #659228.
3002
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003003- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3004 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3005 See SF patch #651082.
3006
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003007- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003008
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003009- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3010 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3011
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003012- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003013 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003014
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003015- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3016 DOS paths from other platforms.
3017
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003018Tools/Demos
3019-----------
3020
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003021- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3022 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3023 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3024 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3025 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3026 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3027 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3028 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3029 example:
3030
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003031 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3032 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003033
3034 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3035
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003036
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003037Build
3038-----
3039
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003040- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3041 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3042 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003043 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3044
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003045 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3046
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003047- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3048 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3049 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3050 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3051 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3052 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3053 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3054 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3055 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3056
3057- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3058 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3059 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3060 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3061
3062- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3063 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3064
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003065C API
3066-----
3067
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003068- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3069 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003070
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003071- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3072 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3073 tp_as_number pointer.
3074
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003075- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3076 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3077 (SF #681367)
3078
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003079- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3080 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3081 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3082 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003083
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003084Tests
3085-----
3086
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003087- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003088 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3089 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3090 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3091 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3092 pydoc.)
3093
3094- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3095
3096- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003097
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003098Windows
3099-------
3100
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003101- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3102 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3103 time).
3104
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003105- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3106 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3107
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003108- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3109 release without strong cryptography.
3110
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003111- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003112 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003113
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003114- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3115 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003117Mac
3118---
3119
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003120- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3121 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003122
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003123- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3124 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3125 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003126
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003127- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3128 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003129
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003130- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3131 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3132 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3133 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003134
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003135- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003136 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3137 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3138 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003139
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003140
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003141What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003142=================================
3143
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003144*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003146Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003148
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003149- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3150
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003151- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3152 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003153 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003154 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003155 a different meaning than before.
3156
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003157- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003158 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003159 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003160
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003161- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003162 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003163 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003164
3165- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3166 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3167 and deallocation.
3168
3169- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3170 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3171
3172- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3173 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3174 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3175 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3176 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3177
3178- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3179 now detected by the garbage collector.
3180
3181- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3182 [SF bug 519621]
3183
3184- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3185 identifier.
3186
3187- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3188 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3189 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3190 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3191 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3192 [SF bug 563060]
3193
3194- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3195 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3196 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3197 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3198 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3199
3200- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3201 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3202 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3203
3204- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3205
3206- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3207 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3208 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3209 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3210 state of the slots would be lost.)
3211
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003212Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003213-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003214
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003215- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003216 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3217 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3218 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3219 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003220 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3221 Jython 2.1.
3222
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003223- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003224 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003225 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3226 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3227 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3228 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3229 these, see PEP 302.
3230
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003231- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3232 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3233 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3234
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003235- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3236 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3237 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3238
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003239- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3240 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3241 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3242
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003243- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3244 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3245 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3246 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3247 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3248 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3249 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3250 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3251 releases or implementations.
3252
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003253- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003254 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3255 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003256
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003257- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3258 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3259
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003260- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3261 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3262 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3263
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003264- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3265 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3266
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003267- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3268 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003269 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3270 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003271
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003272- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3273 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3274 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3275 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3276 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3277
3278 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3279 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3280 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3281 pattern.
3282
3283 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3284 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3285 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3286 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3287
3288 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3289 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3290 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3291 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3292 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3293 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3294
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003295- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3296 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3297 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3298 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3299 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3300 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3301 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3302 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003303
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003304- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3305 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3306 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3307 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3308 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003309 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3310 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3311 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3312 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3313 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3314 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3315 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003316
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003317- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3318 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3319
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003320- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3321 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3322 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3323 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3324 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3325 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3326 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3327 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3328 to Zack Weinberg!
3329
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003330- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3331 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3332 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3333 type. This has been fixed now.
3334
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003335- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3336 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3337 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3338
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003339- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3340 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3341 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3342 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3343 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3344 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3345 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3346 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003347 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003348
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003349- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3350 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3351 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003352
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003353- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3354 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3355 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3356 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3357 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3358 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3359 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3360 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003361 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003362 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3363 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3364
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003365- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3366 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3367 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3368 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3369 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3370 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3371 this.)
3372
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003373- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3374 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003375 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003376 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003377 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3378 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003379 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3380 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003381
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003382- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3383 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3384 currently running.
3385
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003386- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3387 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3388 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3389 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3390
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003391- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3392 as directory names.
3393
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003394- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3395 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3396
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003397- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3398 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3399
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003400- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003401 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3402 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003403
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003404- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3405 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3406 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3407 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3408 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3409
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003410- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3411 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3412 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3413 removed.
3414
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003415- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3416 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3417 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3418
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003419- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3420 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3421 to __debug__.
3422
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003423- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3424 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3425 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3426
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003427- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3428 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3429 deprecated now.
3430
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003431- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3432 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3433 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003434
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003435- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3436 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3437 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3438 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3439 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003440
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003441- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3442 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3443
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003444- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3445 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3446 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003447 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003448 is backward compatible.
3449
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003450- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3451 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3452 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3453 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3454 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3455
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003456- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3457 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3458 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3459 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3460 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3461 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003462
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003463- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3464 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3465
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003466- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3467 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3468
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003469- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3470 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3471 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3472 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3473 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3474
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003475- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3476 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3477 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3478
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003479- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003480 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3481
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003482- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3483 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3484 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003485
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003486- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3487 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3488
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003489- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3490 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3491 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3492
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003493- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3494
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003495Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003497
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003498- Added three operators to the operator module:
3499 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3500 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3501 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3502
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003503- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3504
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003505- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3506 archives.
3507
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003508- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3509 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3510 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3511
3512 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3513
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003514- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3515 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3516 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003517 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003518
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003519- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3520 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3521 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3522 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003523 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3524 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3525 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3526 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003527
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003528- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3529 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003530
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003531- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3532
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003533- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3534 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3535
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003536- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3537 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3538 supported.
3539
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003540- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3541
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003542- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3543 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003544
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003545- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3546 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3547
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003548- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3549
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003550- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3551 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3552
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003553- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3554 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3555 functions but callable type objects.
3556
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003557- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003558 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003559 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003560
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003561- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3562 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003563
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003564- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3565 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003566
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003567- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3568 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3569 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3570 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3571
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003572- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3573 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003574
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003575- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3576 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3577 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3578 and __imul__.
3579
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003580- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003581 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3582 is called.
3583
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003584- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3585 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3586 interpreter was compiled.
3587
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003588- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3589 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3590 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003591 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003592 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3593 1, not 2.
3594
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003595- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3596 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3597 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3598 limit.
3599
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003600- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3601 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3602 bug #623464.
3603
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003604- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3605 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3606 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3607 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3608
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003611
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003612- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3613
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003614- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3615 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3616 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3617 with Python 2.3a2.
3618
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003619- os.path exposes getctime.
3620
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003621- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003622 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003623 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003624 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003625 unit tests of floating point results.
3626
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003627- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3628 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3629 has been increased.
3630
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003631- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3632 executed.
3633
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003634- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3635 postinstallation script.
3636
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003637- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3638 test the current module.
3639
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003640- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003641 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3642 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3643 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3644 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3645
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003646- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003647 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003648 Ward's Optik package.
3649
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003650- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3651 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3652 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3653 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3654
3655- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3656 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003657 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003658
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003659- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3660 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3661 shelf are binary pickles.
3662
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003663- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3664 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3665
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003666- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3667 modules are iterators now.
3668
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003669- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3670 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3671 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3672 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3673 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3674 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003675
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003676- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3677 with their entity value.
3678
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003679- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3680
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003681- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3682 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003683
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003684- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3685 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003686 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003687
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003688- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3689 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3690 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3691 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3692 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3693 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3694 main():
3695
3696 import locale
3697 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3698
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003699- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3700 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3701
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003702- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3703 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3704 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3705 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3706 to the new standard.
3707
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003708- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3709 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3710 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3711 an extension to the database.
3712
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003713- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3714 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3715 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3716 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003717 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003718
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003719- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003720 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003721
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003722- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3723 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3724 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3725 bounded integers.
3726
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003727- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3728 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3729 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3730 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3731 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3732 in existence.
3733
3734 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3735 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3736 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3737 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3738 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3739 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3740
3741 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3742 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3743 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3744 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3745
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003746- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3747 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3748 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3749
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003750- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3751
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003752- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3753 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3754 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3755 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3756
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003757- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3758 argument.
3759
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003760- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3761 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3762 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3763 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3764 [SF patch 560794].
3765
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003766- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3767 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3768 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003769 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3770 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3771 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003772
3773- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3774 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003775
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003776- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3777 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3778 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3779 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003780
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003781- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3782 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3783 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3784 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3785 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3786
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003787- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003788
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003789- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3790
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003791- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3792 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3793 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3794 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3795 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3796 identical to None.
3797
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003798- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3799 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3800 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3801 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3802 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3803 results now.
3804
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003805- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3806 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3807
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003808- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3809 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3810 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3811 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3812 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3813 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3814 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3815 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3816
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003817- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3818
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003819- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3820 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3821
3822- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3823 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3824 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3825 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3826 and other systems.
3827
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003828- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3829 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3830 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3831 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 +00003832 work well with these.
3833
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003834- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3835
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003836- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003837 connections.
3838
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003839- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3840 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3841 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3842
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003843- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3844 sets
3845
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003846- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3847 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3848 name.
3849
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003850- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3851 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3852 passed in.
3853
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003854- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003855 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003856 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3857 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003858
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003859- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3860
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003861- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3862
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003863- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3864 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3865 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3866
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003867- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3868 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3869 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3870 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003871 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003872
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003873- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003874 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003875 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003876
3877- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3878 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3879 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3880
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003881- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003882 the value of its expression argument.
3883
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003884- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3885 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3886 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3887
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003888- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3889 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3890 skipstone browser was included.
3891
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003892- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3893 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3894
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003895Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003897
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003898- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3899 names in addition to accepting file names.
3900
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003901- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3902 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3903 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3904 still used and useful.)
3905
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003906- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3907 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3908 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3909 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003910
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003911- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3912 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3913 the generated binary.
3914
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003915Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003917
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003918- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3919
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003920- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3921 except in the hands of experts.
3922
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003923- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003924 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3925 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3926 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003927
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003928- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3929 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3930 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3931 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3932 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3933 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3934 builds.
3935
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003936- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3937 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3938 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3939 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3940 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3941 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3942 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3943 new type.
3944
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003945- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003946
3947 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3948 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3949 positive infinities.
3950
3951 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3952 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3953 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3954 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3955 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3956 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3957 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3958
3959 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3960
3961 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3962
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003963- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3964 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3965 size of the executable.
3966
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003967- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3968 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3969 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3970 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003971
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003972- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3973
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003974- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3975 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3976 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003977
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003978- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3979 well as Unix.
3980
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003981- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3982 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3983 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3984 modules in the README file for details.
3985
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003986C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003988
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003989- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3990 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003991 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003992 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003993 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003994
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003995- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3996 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3997 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3998 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3999 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4000 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004001 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004002 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4003 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4004 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4005 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4006 aligned.)
4007
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004008- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4009 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4010 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4011
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004012- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4013 level.
4014
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004015- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4016 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4017 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4018 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4019 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4020
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004021- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4022 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4023 code.
4024
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004025- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4026 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4027 adjusting for negative indices.
4028
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004029- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4030 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4031 object.
4032
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004033- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4034 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4035 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4036
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004037- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4038 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004039
4040- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4041
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004042- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4043 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4044 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4045 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4046
4047- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4048
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004049- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004050
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004051- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004052 without going through the buffer API.
4053
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004055
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004056- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4057 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4058 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4059 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4060
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004061- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4062 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4063
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004064- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004065 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4066
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004067New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004069
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004070- OpenVMS is now supported.
4071
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004072- AtheOS is now supported.
4073
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004074- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4075
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004076- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004078Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-----
4080
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004081- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4082 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4083 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004084
4085Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004087
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004088- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4089 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4090 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4091 bugs.
4092 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004093 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004094 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4095 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004096 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004097
4098- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004099 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004100
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004101- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4102 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4103
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004104- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4105 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004106 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004107 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4108
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004109- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4110 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4111 use files" uninstall option).
4112
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004113- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4114
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004115- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4116 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4117
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004118- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4119 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4120 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4121
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004122- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4123 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4124 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4125 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4126 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004127 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4128 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4129 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004130
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004131- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004132 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004133 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4134 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4135 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4136 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4137 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4138 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4139 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4140 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4141 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4142 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4143 work around.
4144
4145- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4146 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4147 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4148 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4149 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4150 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4151 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4152 specified with O_CREAT too).
4153
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004154Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155----
4156
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004157- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004158
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004159- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4160 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4161 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4162
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004163- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4164 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4165 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4166
4167- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4168 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4169 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4170 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4171 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4172 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4173 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4174 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004175
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004176- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4177 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4178 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004179
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004180- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4181 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4182 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4183 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4184 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004185
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004186- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4187 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4188 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004189
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004190- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4191 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004192
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004193- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4194 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4195 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4196 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4197 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004198
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004199- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4200 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4201 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4202
4203- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4204 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4205 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004206
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004207- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4208 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4209 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4210 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004211 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004212
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004213- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4214 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004215
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004216- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4217 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004218
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004219- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004220 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004221 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4222 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004223
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004224
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004225What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004226===============================
4227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4229
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004230Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004232
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004233- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4234 with a custom metaclass.
4235
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004236Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004238
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004239- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4240 are proxies.
4241
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004242Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004244
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004245- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4246 very short strings.
4247
4248- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4249 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4250 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4251 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4252 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4253
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004254Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004256
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004257- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4258 close or delete time).
4259
4260- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4261 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4262
4263- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4264
4265- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004266 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004267
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004268Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004270
4271Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004273
4274C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004276
4277New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004279
4280Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004282
4283Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004285
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004286- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4287
4288- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4289 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4290
4291- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4292 deleted at process exit time.
4293
4294- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4295 in backslash.
4296
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004297Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004299
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004300- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4301 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4302 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4303
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004304
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004305What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004306===========================
4307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4309
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004312
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004313- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4314 been extensively updated. See
4315
4316 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4317
4318 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4319
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004320- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4321 deleted!
4322
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004323- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4324 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4325 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4326 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4327 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4328
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004329- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4330
4331 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4332 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4333
4334 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4335 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4336 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4337 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4338 supported anyway.
4339
4340 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4341 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4342
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004343- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4344 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4345 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4346 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4347 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004348
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004349- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4350 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4351 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4352
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004353Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004355
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004356- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4357 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4358 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4359 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4360 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4361 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004362 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4363 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4364 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4365 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004366
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004367- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4368 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4369 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4370
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004371Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004373
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004374- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4375
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004376Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004378
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004379- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4380 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4381 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4382 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4383 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4384 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4385
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004386- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4387
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004388- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4389
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004390- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4391
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004392- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4393 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4394 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4395
4396- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4397
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004398Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004400
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004401- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4402 off a search on Google.
4403
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004404Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004406
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004407- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4408 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4409 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4410 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4411 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4412 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4413 other platforms should do likewise.
4414
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004415- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4416 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4417 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4418
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004419C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004421
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004422- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4423 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4424 producing key-value pairs.
4425
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004426- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004427 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004428 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4429 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4430 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4431 previously went unchallenged.
4432
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004433New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004435
4436Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004438
4439Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004441
4442Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004444
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004445- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4446 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004447
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004448- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4449 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4450 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4451 home.
4452
4453
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004454What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004455===========================
4456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4458
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004461
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004462- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4463 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004464
4465 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004466 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004467
4468 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4469 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004470 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004471 This needs to be documented.
4472
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004473- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4474 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4475
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004476- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4477 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4478 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4479
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004480- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4481 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4482
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004483- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4484 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4485 class forbids it).
4486
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004487- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4488 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4489 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4490
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004491- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004493Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004495
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004496- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4497 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004498 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004499
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004500- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4501 (like 1 + '').
4502
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004505
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004506- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4507 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4508 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4509 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004510 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004511 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4512
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004513- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4514 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4515 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4516 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4517
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004518- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4519 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004520 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4521 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4522 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004523
4524- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4525 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004526
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004527- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4528 bytes on its input.
4529
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004532
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004533- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004534 convenience function.
4535
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004536- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4537 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4538 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004539 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4540 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4541 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4542 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4543 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4544 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004545
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004546- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4547 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4548 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4549 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4550
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004551- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4552 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4553 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4554
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004555- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4556 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4557 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4558 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4559
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004560- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4561 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004563 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4564 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4565 new -l and -e options.
4566
4567- statcache is now deprecated.
4568
4569- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4570 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004572 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4573 time properly taken into account.
4574
4575- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4576 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4577 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4578 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004580Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004582
4583Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004585
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004586- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4587 is built with libdb3 if available.
4588
4589- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4590
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004591C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004593
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004594- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4595 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4596 PySequence_Size().
4597
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004598- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4599
4600- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4601 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4602 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4603
4604- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4605 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4606
4607- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4608 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4609
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004610New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004612
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004613- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4614 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4615
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004616- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4617 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4618
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004619- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4620
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004621Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004623
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004624- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4625 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4626
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004627Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004629
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004630Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004632
4633- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4634 removed completely in the next release.
4635
4636- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4637 OSX.
4638
4639- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4640 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4641
4642- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004644
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004645What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004646===========================
4647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4649
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004652
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004653- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004654 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004655 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004656 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4657 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004658 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4659 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004660 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4661 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004662
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004663- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4664 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4665
4666- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4667 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4668
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004669Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004671
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004672- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4673 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4674 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4675 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4676 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4677 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4678 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4679 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4680
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004681- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4682 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4683 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4684 example).
4685
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004686- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004687 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004688 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004689 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004690
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004691- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4692 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4693 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004694 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004695
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004696- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4697 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4698 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4699 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4700 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4701 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4702
4703 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4704
4705 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4706
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004707Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004709
4710- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4711
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004712- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4713
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004714- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4715 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004716
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004717- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4718 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4719 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4720 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4721 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4722 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004723 attributes.
4724
4725- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4726 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4727 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004728
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004729- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4730 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4731 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004732
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004733- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4734 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4735 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004736 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4737 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4738
4739- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4740 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004741
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004742Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004744
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004745- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4746 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4747
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004748- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4749 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4750 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4751 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4752
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004753- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4754 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4755 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4756 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4757
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004758 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4759 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4760 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4761 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4762 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4763 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4764 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4765 without losing information).
4766
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004767- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004768 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4769 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4770 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4771 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4772 module).
4773
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004774 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004775 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4776 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4777 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4778 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004779
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004780- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004781 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4782 encoding.
4783
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004784- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4785 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004788 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4789
4790- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4791 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4792 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4793 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4794
4795- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4796
4797- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4798 ON, and OFF.
4799
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004800- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4801 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4802
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004803Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004805
4806- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4807 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4808 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004809
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004810- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4811 been added: -X and -E.
4812
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004813Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004815
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004816- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4817 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4818
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004819C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004821
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004822- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4823 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4824 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4825 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4826 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4827
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004828- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4829 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4830 as long) arguments.
4831
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004832- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4833 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4834 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4835 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4836 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4837 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4838
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004839- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4840 input.
4841
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004842New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004844
4845Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004847
4848Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004850
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004851- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4852 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4853 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4854
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004855- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4856 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4857 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004858 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4861 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4862 import signal
4863 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004866 while 1:
4867 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004869 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4870 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4871 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4872 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004873
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004874
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004875What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4876===========================
4877
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4879
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004880Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004882
4883- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4884 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4885 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4886
4887- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4888 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4889 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4890 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4891 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4892 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4893 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004894
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004895- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004896 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004897 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4898 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4899 associate a docstring with a property.
4900
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004901- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4902 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4903 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4904 other built-in object types.
4905
4906- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4907 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4908 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4909 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4910 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4911
4912- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4913 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4914
4915- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4916 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004917 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004918 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4919 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4920 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4921 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4922 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4923
4924- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4925 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4926 class.
4927
4928- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4929 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4930 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4931 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4932
4933- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4934 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4935 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4936 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4937
4938- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4939 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4940
4941- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4942 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4943 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4944 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4945 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004946 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004947 with the same value as s.
4948
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004949- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4950
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004951Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004953
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004954- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4955
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004956- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4957 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4958 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4959 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4960 objects.
4961
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004962- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4963 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004964 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4965 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4966
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004967- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4968 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4969 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4970
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004973
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004974- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4975 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4976 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4977 by the instances.
4978
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004979- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4980 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4981 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4982
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004983- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4984 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4985 before the entire comparison is complete.
4986
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004987- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4988 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4989 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4990
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004991- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4992 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4993 getwriter().
4994
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004995- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4996 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4997
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004998- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004999 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5000 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5001
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005002- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5003 iterable object.
5004
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005005- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5006 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005007
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005008- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5009 authentication.
5010
5011- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5012 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005013
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005014- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005015 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5016 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5017 a sample driver.)
5018
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005019Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005021
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005022- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5023 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5024 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5025 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5026 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5027 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5028 kernel has large file support.
5029
5030- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5031 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5032 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5033 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5034 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5035
5036- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5037 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5038 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5039
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005040C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005042
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005043- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5044 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5045
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005046New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005048
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005049- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5050 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5051
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005052Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005053-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005054
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005055- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5056 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5057 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5058 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5059 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5060
5061- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5062 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5063 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5064 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5065
5066- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5067 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5068
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005069Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005071
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005072- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005073 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5074 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005075
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005076
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005077What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5078===========================
5079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5081
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005082Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005084
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005085- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5086 big to represent as a C double.
5087
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005088- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5089 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5090 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5091 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5092 restriction).
5093
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005094- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5095 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5096 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5097 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5098 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5099
5100 >>> dir([])
5101 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5102 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5103 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5104 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5105 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5106 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5107 'reverse', 'sort']
5108
5109 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5110
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005111- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005112 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5113 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5114 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5115 OverflowError exception.
5116
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005117- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005118 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005119 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5120 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5121 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5122 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5123 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005124 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5126 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5127
5128 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5129 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5130 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5131 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005132
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005133- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005134 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5135 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5136 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5137 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5138 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5139 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5140 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5141 once it is created.
5142
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005143- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5144 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5145 (key, value) pairs.
5146
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005147- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005148 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5149 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5150
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005151- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5152 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5153 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5154 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5155 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005156
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005157- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005158 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5159 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5160
5161 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5162
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005163- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005164 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5165
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005166Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005168
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005169- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005170 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5171 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005172
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005173- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5174 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5175 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5176 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5177 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5178 in this area anymore).
5179
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005180- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5181 threading.Timer.
5182
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005183- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5184 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5185
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005186- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005187 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5188
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005189- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005190 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5191 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5192 converted to Python longs.
5193
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005194- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005195 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5196
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005197- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5198 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5199 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5200
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005201Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005203
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005204- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5205 division operators as per PEP 238.
5206
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005207Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005209
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005210- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5211 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5212 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5213 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5214
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005215C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005217
5218- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005219
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005220- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5221 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005222 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005223
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5225 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005226 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005228
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005229- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005230 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5231 module:
5232
5233 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005234
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005235 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5236 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005237
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005238 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5239 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005240
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005241 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5242
5243 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5244
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005245- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005246 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5247 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5248 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005249
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005250New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005252
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005253- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5254 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5255 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5256 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5257 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005258
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005259Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005261
5262Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005263-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005264
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005265- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5266 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5267 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5268 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005269 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5270 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5271 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5272 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5273 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005274
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005275- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005276 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5277
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005278
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005279What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5280===========================
5281
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5283
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005284Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005286
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005287- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5288 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5289
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005290- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5291 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5292 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005293
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005294- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5295 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5296 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5297 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005298
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005299- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5300
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005301- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005302
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005303Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005305
5306- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005307 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005308 the module docstring for details.
5309
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005310Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005311-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005312
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005313- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005314 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5315 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5316 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005317
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005318- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5319 Nick Mathewson.
5320
5321Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005323
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005324- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5325 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5326 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5327 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5328 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5329 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5330 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5331 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5332
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005333- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5334 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5335 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5336 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5337
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005338- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5339 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5340 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5341 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5342 come a long way).
5343
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005344- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5345 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5346 write filters for these warnings).
5347
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005348- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5349 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5350 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5351 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5352 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5353
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005354- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5355 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5356 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5357 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5358 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5359 older distribution.
5360
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005361Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005363
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005364- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5365 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005366 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005367
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005368- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5369 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5370 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5371
5372- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5373
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005374- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5375
5376- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5377
5378- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005381
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005382- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5383
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005384New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005386
5387C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005388-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005389
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005390- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5391 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5392 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5393 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5394 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5395 against buffer overruns.
5396
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005397- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005398 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5399 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005400 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5401 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5402 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5403
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005404- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5405 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5406 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5407 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5408 deprecated.
5409
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005410Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005412
5413- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5414 relevant is found.
5415
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005416
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005417What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005418===========================
5419
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5421
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005422Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005424
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005425- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5426 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5427 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5428 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5429 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5430 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5431 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5432 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005433 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005434 repaired.
5435
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005436- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005437 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005438 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5439 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5440 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5441 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5442 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5443 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5444 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5445 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5446
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005447- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5448 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5449 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5450 leading BMO character).
5451
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005452- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5453 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5454 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5455
5456 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5457 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5458 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005459
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005460 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5461 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5462 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5463 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5464 for various simple to use conversions.
5465
5466 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5467 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5470 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5471 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5472 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5473 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5474 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5475 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5476 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5477 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5478 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5479 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5480 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5481 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5482 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5483 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005484
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005485- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5486 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5487 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005488 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005489 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005490
5491 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005492 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5493 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5494 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5495 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5496 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005497 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5498 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005499
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005500 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5501 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5502 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005503 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005504
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005505- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5506 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5507 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5508 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5509 floating arithmetic,
5510
5511 x = 9007199254740992.0
5512 print long(x)
5513
5514 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5515 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5516 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5517 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5518 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5519 functions are of good quality).
5520
5521 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5522 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5523 algorithms to break.
5524
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005525- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5526 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5527 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5528 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5529 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5530 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5531 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5532 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5533 order.
5534
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005535- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5536 operation along the most common code paths.
5537
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005538- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5539 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5540
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005541- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5542 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5543 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5544 {}.update(UserDict())
5545
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005546- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5547 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5548 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5549 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5550 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5551 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5552 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5553 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5554
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005555- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005556 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005557
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005558 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005559 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5560 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005561 join() method of strings
5562 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005563 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5564 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005565 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005566 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005567
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005568- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5569 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5570
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005571- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5572 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5573
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005574- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5575 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5576 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5577 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5578
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005579- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5580 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005581 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005582 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5583 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005584
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005585- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5586
5587
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005588Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005589-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005590
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005591- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005592 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005593 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5594 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5595
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005596- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5597 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5598
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005599- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5600 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5601 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5602 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5603
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005604- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5605 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5606 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5607
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005608- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5609
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005610- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5611
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005612- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5613 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5614 that are still imported into string.py).
5615
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005616- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5617
5618- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5619 Now it does.
5620
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005621- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5622
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005623- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5624 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5625 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5626 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5627 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005628 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5629 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005630
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005631- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5632 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5633 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5634 'help(object)'.
5635
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005636Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005638
5639- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005640 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005641 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5642 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5643
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005644- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005645 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5646 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005647
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005648C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005649-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005650
5651- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5652 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005653
5654----
5655
5656**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**