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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000015- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
16
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000017- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
18 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
19 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
20 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
21
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000022- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
23 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
24 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
25 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
26 absolute_import' is used.
27
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000028- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
29 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
30 exceptions.
31
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000032- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
33 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
34
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000035- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
36
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000037- Patch 1433928:
38 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
39 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
40 KeyError.
41
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000042- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
43 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
44 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000045 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000046 The following objects have __context__ methods:
47 - The built-in file type.
48 - The thread.LockType type.
49 - The following types defined by the threading module:
50 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
51 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000052
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000053- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
54 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
55
56 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
57 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
58
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000059- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
60
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000061- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
62 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
63 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
64
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000065- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
66 configure would break checking curses.h.
67
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000068- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
69 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
70
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000071- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
72
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000073- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
74
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000075- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
76
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000077- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
78 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
79
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000080- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +000081 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000082 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
83
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000084- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
85 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000086 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000087
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000088- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
89 now encodes backslash correctly.
90
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000091- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
92
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000093- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
94 and long longs.
95
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000096- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
97 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
98 message in this case.
99
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000100- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
101 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
102 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
103 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
104 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
105
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000106- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000107
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000108- Speed up some Unicode operations.
109
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000110- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
111 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000112 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000113
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000114- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000115 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
116
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000117- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
118
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000119- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
120 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
121
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000122- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
123
124- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
125
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000126- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
127 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
128 was empty.
129
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000130- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
131 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
132
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000133- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000134 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000135
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000136- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
137 codes.
138
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000139- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
140 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
141 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
142
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000143- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
144 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
145
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000146- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000147 (fixes bug #1119418).
148
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000149- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
150
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000151- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
152 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
153
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000154- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
155 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
156 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
157
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000158- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
159
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000160- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
161 reference counts in some error exit cases.
162
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000163- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
164 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
165 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
166 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
167 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
168 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
169 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
170 realloc.
171
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000172- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
173 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
174
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000175- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
176 like their int counterparts.
177
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000178- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
179 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
180 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
181 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
182 for a longer write-up of the problem).
183
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000184- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
185 serializing floats.
186
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000187- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
188 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
189 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
190
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000191- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
192 278.
193
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000194- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
195 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
196 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
197 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000198 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000199 PyNumber_*().
200 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
201
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000202- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
203 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
204 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
205 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
206
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000207- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
208 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
209 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
210 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
211 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
212
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000213- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
214 disabled caused a crash.
215
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000216- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
217 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
218
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000219- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000220 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
221
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000222- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
223
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000224- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000225 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
226 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
227 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000228
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000229- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
230
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000231- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
232 returning None.
233
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000234- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000235 ('\') with a specific error message.
236
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000237- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
238
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000239- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
240 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
241
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000242- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000243 an ferror() call.
244
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000245- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
246 list.sort().
247
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000248- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
249 (2+3) --> (5).
250
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000251- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
252
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000253- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
254 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000255
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000256- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
257 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
258 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
259
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000260- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
261 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
262 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
263
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000264- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
265 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
266 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
267 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
268 the same thread id).
269
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000270Extension Modules
271-----------------
272
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000273- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
274 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
275
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000276- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
277 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
278
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000279- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
280 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
281
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000282- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
283 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
284
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000285- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
286 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
287
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000288- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
289 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
290 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
291
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000292- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
293 than the system default domain.
294
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000295- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
296 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
297 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
298
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000299- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
300
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000301- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
302 before the env.
303
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000304- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
305
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000306- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
307
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000308- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
309 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
310 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
311
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000312- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
313 without prior setting of the userptr.
314
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000315- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
316
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000317- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
318
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000319- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
320 problem on AIX.
321
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000322- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
323
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000324- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
325
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000326- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
327
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000328- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
329 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
330
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000331- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
332 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
333
334- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
335
336- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000337
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000338- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
339 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
340
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000341- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
342
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000343- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
344 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
345
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000346- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
347 returns in cStringIO.c.
348
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000349- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
350 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
351
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000352- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
353
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000354- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
355
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000356- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
357 the file system encoding.
358
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000359- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
360 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000361
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000362- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
363
364- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000365 line without newlines.
366
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000367- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
368 on Windows.
369
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000370- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000371 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
372
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000373- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
374 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
375 for large or negative values.
376
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000377- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000378 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000379
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000380- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
381
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000382- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
383 if available on the platform.
384
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000385- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
386 available on the platform.
387
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000388- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
389 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
390
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000391- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
392
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000393- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
394 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
395 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
396
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000397- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
398
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000399- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
400 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
401
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000402- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000403 file size.
404
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000405- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
406
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000407- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
408 {remove_history,replace_history}
409
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000410- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
411 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000412
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000413- stat_float_times is now True.
414
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000415- array.array objects are now picklable.
416
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000417- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
418 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
419
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000420- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
421 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
422 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
423
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000424- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
425 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000426
427Library
428-------
429
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000430- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
431 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
432
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000433- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
434 command bdist_msi have been added.
435
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000436- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
437 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
438
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000439- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
440
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000441- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
442 not allowed by the specs.
443
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000444- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
445 be used to control how files are opened.
446
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000447- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
448 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
449
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000450- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
451 current file number.
452
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000453- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
454 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
455
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000456- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
457
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000458- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
459 two gigabytes.
460
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000461- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
462
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000463- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
464 return address using smtplib.
465
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000466- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
467 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000468
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000469- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
470 unless the system is Win32.
471
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000472- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000473 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
474 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
475
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000476- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
477
478- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000479
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000480- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
481
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000482- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000483 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000484
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000485- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
486 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000487
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000488- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
489
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000490- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
491
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000492- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
493 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
494 LoadError subclasses IOError.
495
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000496- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000497 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
498 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
499 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
500 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
501
502 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
503 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
504 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
505 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
506 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000507
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000508- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
509 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
510 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
511
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000512- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
513
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000514- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
515
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000516- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
517 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
518 illegal argument)
519
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000520- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
521 is an error in the format string.
522
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000523- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
524
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000525- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000526 "parent" argument.
527
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000528- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
529 for padding.
530
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000531- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
532 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
533
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000534- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
535 to get the correct encoding.
536
537- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
538 languages.
539
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000540- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
541
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000542- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
543
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000544- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
545
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000546- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
547 functionality.
548
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000549- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
550
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000551- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
552 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
553
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000554- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
555 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
556 match the Content-Length header.
557
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000558- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
559
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000560- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
561 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000562 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000563
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000564- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
565
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000566- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
567
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000568- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
569 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
570
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000571- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
572 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
573 Tkdnd.
574
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000575- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
576 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
577
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000578- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
579 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
580
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000581- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000582 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
583
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000584- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
585 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
586
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000587- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
588 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
589
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000590- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000591 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000592
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000593- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
594
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000595- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
596 error messages.
597
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000598- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
599
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000600- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
601 Bug #1224621.
602
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000603- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
604 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
605 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
606 terminates by raising StopIteration.
607
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000608- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
609
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000610- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
611 component of the path.
612
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000613- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
614 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
615 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
616 class at all.
617
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000618- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
619 files to PyPI.
620
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000621- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
622 them to PyPI.
623
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000624- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
625 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
626 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
627 work as expected.
628
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000629- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
630 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
631
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000632- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000633 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
634
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000635- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
636
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000637- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
638 to build.
639
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000640- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
641 symbolic links on Windows.
642
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000643- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000644 profile.py if available.
645
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000646- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
647
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000648- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
649 in LWPCookieJar.
650
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000651- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
652
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000653- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
654
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000655- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
656
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000657- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
658
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000659- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
660
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000661- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
662
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000663- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
664
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000665- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
666
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000667- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
668 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
669 be exploited in various ways.
670
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000671- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000672 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
673
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000674- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
675 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
676
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000677- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000678 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
679
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000680- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
681
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000682- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
683
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000684- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
685
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000686- Enhancements to the csv module:
687
688 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000689 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000690 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000691 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
692 reporting.
693 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
694 dictates.
695 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000696 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000697 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000698 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
699 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000700 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
701 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000702 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000703 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
704 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
705 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
706 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
707 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
708 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
709 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
710 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
711 without first creating a dialect class.
712 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
713 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
714 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000715 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000716 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
717 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000718 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
719 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
720 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
721 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000722 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
723 This has been fixed.
724
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000725- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
726 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
727 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
728 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
729
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000730- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
731
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000732- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
733 (Bug #951915).
734
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000735- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
736 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
737 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000738 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000739
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000740- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
741
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000742- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
743 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
744
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000745- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
746
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000747- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
748
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000749- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
750
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000751- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
752
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000753- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
754
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000755- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
756 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
757 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
758
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000759- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000760 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000761
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000762- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
763 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
764 tokenizer with very long source lines.
765
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000766- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
767 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
768 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000769
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000770- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
771 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000772
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000773- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
774 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
775
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000776- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
777 correctly.
778
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000779- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
780 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
781 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
782 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
783 between two lines.
784
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000785- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
786 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
787 handlers.
788
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000789- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000790 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
791 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000792
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000793- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
794 considering it exactly like a '*'.
795
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000796- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
797 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000798
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000799- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
800
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000801- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
802 touch the recursion limit.
803
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000804Build
805-----
806
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000807- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
808
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000809- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
810
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000811- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
812
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000813- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
814
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000815- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
816 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
817
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000818- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
819
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000820- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
821 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
822
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000823- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
824 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
825
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000826- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
827 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
828 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000829 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000830
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000831- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
832 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
833 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
834
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000835- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
836
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000837- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
838 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
839
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000840- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
841 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
842 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
843 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
844 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
845 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
846 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
847 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
848
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000849- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
850 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
851 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
852 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
853
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000854C API
855-----
856
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000857- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
858
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000859- Removed PyRange_New().
860
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000861- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
862 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
863 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
864 mappings.
865
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000866
867Tests
868-----
869
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000870- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000871
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000872- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
873 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
874
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000875
876Documentation
877-------------
878
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000879- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
880
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000881- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
882 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
883
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000884- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
885
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000886- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
887
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000888- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
889
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000890- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
891
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000892- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
893
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000894- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
895
896- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
897
898- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
899
900- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
901
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000902- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
903 Closes bug #1166582.
904
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000905- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
906 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
907 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
908
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000909Mac
910---
911
912
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000913New platforms
914-------------
915
916- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
917
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000918
919Tools/Demos
920-----------
921
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000922- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
923 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
924 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
925
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000926- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
927 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
928 source files that need an encoding declaration.
929 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
930
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000931- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
932
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000933- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000934
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000935- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
936 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000937
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000938What's New in Python 2.4 final?
939===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000940
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000941*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000942
943Core and builtins
944-----------------
945
946- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
947 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
948 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
949
950
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000951What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
952==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000953
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000954*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000955
956Core and builtins
957-----------------
958
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000959- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
960 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
961 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
962
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000963
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000964Library
965-------
966
967- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
968 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
969 raised is re-raised.
970
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000971- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
972 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
973
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000974- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
975 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
976 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
977 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
978 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
979 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
980 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
981 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
982 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
983 by the slice are recomputed now.
984
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000985- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000986
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000987Build
988-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000989
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000990- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
991 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
992 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000993
994C API
995-----
996
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000997- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
998
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000999
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001000What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1001================================
1002
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001003*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001004
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001005License
1006-------
1007
1008The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1009is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1010changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1011Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1012intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1013durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1014the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1015License::
1016
1017 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1018
1019says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1020to Python 2.1.1.
1021
1022The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1023License Version 2.
1024
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001025Core and builtins
1026-----------------
1027
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001028- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1029 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1030 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1031 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1032 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1033 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1034 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001035 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001036 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1037 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1038
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001039- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001040
1041Extension Modules
1042-----------------
1043
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001044- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1045 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1046 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1047 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001048
1049Library
1050-------
1051
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001052- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1053 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1054 returned.
1055
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001056- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1057
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001058- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1059 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1060
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001061- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1062
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001063- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1064 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001065
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001066- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1067
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001068- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1069
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001070- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001071 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1072
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001073Build
1074-----
1075
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001076- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001077
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001078What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1079================================
1080
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001081*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001082
1083Core and builtins
1084-----------------
1085
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001086- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001087 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1088
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001089- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1090 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1091 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1092 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1093
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001094- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1095 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1096
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001097- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1098 constant.
1099
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001100- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1101 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1102 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1103 large), and to anomalies such as
1104 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1105 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1106 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1107 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001108
1109Extension modules
1110-----------------
1111
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001112- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1113 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001114 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1115 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1116 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001117
1118Library
1119-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001120
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001121- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001122 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001123 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1124 --swig-cpp.
1125
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001126- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1127 it is set.
1128
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001129- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001130
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001131- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1132 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1133 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1134 Closes bug #1039270.
1135
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001136- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001137
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001138 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001139 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1140 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1141 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1142 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1143 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1144 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1145 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1146 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1147 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1148 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1149 + Updates to documentation.
1150
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001151- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1152 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1153 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1154 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1155
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001156- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001157
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001158- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1159 applications should use the getmember function.
1160
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001161- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1162
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001163- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1164 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1165 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1166 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1167 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1168 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1169 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1170 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1171 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1172
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001173- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1174 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001175 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001176
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001177- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1178 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1179 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1180 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1181 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1182 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1183 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1184 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001185
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001186- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1187 the new public features (of which there are many).
1188
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001189- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001190 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1191 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1192 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1193 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001194 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001195
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001196- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1197
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001198- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1199 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1200 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1201 options.
1202
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001203- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1204 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1205 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1206 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1207 conditions under which non-string values work.
1208
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001209Build
1210-----
1211
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001212- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1213 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1214 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1215
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001216- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1217 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1218 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1219 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1220 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001221
1222C API
1223-----
1224
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001225- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1226 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1227
1228- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1229
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001230- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1231 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1232 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1233 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1234 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1235 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1236 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1237 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1238 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1239
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001240- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1241
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001242- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1243 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1244 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001245
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001246Tests
1247-----
1248
1249- test__locale ported to unittest
1250
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001251Mac
1252---
1253
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001254- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1255 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1256 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001257
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001258Tools/Demos
1259-----------
1260
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001261- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1262 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1263 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1264 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1265 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001266
1267
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001268What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1269=================================
1270
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001271*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001272
1273Core and builtins
1274-----------------
1275
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001276- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001277 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1278
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001279- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1280 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1281 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1282 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1283 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1284 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1285 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1286 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001287 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1288 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1289 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1290 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1291 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001292
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001293- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1294 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1295 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1296 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1297 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1298
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001299- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1300
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001301- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1302 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1303
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001304- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1305 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1306 modified the list.
1307
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001308- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1309 functions is now writable.
1310
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001311- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1312 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1313 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1314 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1315
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001316- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1317 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1318 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1319 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1320 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001321
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001322- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1323 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1324
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001325Extension modules
1326-----------------
1327
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001328- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1329
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001330- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1331 data.
1332
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001333- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1334 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1335 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1336 supposed to have been truncated away.
1337
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001338- Added socket.socketpair().
1339
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001340- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1341 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1342
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001343- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001344 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1345
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001346Library
1347-------
1348
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001349- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001350 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001351
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001352- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1353 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1354
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001355- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1356 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1357
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001358- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1359
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001360- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1361 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001362
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001363- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1364 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1365
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001366- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1367
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001368- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1369
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001370- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1371
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001372- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1373 Percivall.
1374
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001375- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1376 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1377
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001378- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1379 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1380 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001381 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001382
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001383- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1384 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1385 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1386 and exponent.
1387
1388- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1389
1390- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001391 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001392 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1393
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001394- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1395 to the readline module.
1396
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001397- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001398 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1399 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001400
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001401- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1402 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1403 contains symlinks.
1404
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001405- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1406 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1407
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001408- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1409 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1410 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1411
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001412- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1413 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1414 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1415 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1416 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1417 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1418 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1419 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1420 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1421 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1422 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1423 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1424 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1425
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001426- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1427
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001428Tools/Demos
1429-----------
1430
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001431- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1432 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1433
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001434- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1435
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001436Build
1437-----
1438
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001439- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1440 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1441 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1442 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1443 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1444 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1445 plans to do so.
1446
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001447- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1448 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1449
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001450- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1451 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1452
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001453- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1454 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1455
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001456- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1457 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1458
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001459- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1460 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1461
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001462C API
1463-----
1464
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001465..
1466
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001467Documentation
1468-------------
1469
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001470- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1471 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1472
1473- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1474 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1475 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001476
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001477New platforms
1478-------------
1479
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001480- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1481
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001482Tests
1483-----
1484
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001485..
1486
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001487Windows
1488-------
1489
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001490- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1491 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1492 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1493 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1494 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1495 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1496 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1497 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1498 the problem.
1499
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001500Mac
1501---
1502
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001503..
1504
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001505
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001506What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1507=================================
1508
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001509*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001510
1511Core and builtins
1512-----------------
1513
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001514- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1515 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1516 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1517 sensitive code.
1518
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001519- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001520 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001521
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001522 @staticmethod
1523 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001524
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001525 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001526
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001527- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1528 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1529 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1530 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1531 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1532 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1533 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1534 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1535 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1536 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1537 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1538
1539 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1540 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1541 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1542 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1543 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1544 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1545 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1546
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001547- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1548 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1549
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001550- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001551 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001552
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001553- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001554 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001555 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1556
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001557- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001558 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1559 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1560
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001561- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1562 types that support garbage collection.
1563
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001564- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1565
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001566- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1567 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1568 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1569 Jython.
1570
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001571- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1572
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001573- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1574 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1575
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001576- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1577 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1578 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001579
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001580- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1581 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1582 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1583
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001584Extension modules
1585-----------------
1586
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001587- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1588
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001589Library
1590-------
1591
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001592- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1593 TIS-620
1594
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001595- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1596 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1597 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1598 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1599 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1600 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1601 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1602 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1603 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1604 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1605
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001606- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1607
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001608- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1609 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1610 same as when the argument is omitted).
1611 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1612
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001613- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1614
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001615- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1616 schemes are offered.
1617
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001618- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1619
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001620- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1621 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1622 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1623
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001624- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1625
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001626- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1627 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1628
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001629- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1630 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1631 when dummy_threading is being used.
1632
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001633- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1634 from a tarfile.
1635
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001636- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001637 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001638
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001639- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1640 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1641 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1642 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1643
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001644- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1645 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1646
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001647- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1648 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1649 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1650 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1651 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1652 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1653 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1654 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1655 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1656 by some other method in progress).
1657
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001658- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1659 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1660 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001661
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001662- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1663
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001664- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1665 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1666 AM Kuchling.
1667
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001668- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1669 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1670 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1671
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001672- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1673 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1674 instead of unsigned.
1675
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001676- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001677 no longer part of the public API.
1678
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001679- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1680 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1681 string methods of the same name).
1682
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001683- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001684 SF patch 945642.
1685
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001686- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1687
1688 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1689
1690 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1691 DocTestSuites.
1692
1693- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1694 that provide thread-local data.
1695
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001696- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1697 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1698
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001699- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1700
1701- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1702 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1703 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1704
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001705- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1706
1707 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1708 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1709 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001710
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001711 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1712 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1713 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1714 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1715
1716 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1717 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1718
1719 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1720 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1721 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1722 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1723
1724 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1725 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1726 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1727 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1728 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1729
1730 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1731 wrapping help output.
1732
1733 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1734 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1735 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001736
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001737C API
1738-----
1739
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001740- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1741 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1742 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1743 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1744 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1745 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1746 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1747 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1748 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1749 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1750 its visible semantics have not changed.
1751
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001752- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1753 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1754
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001755Documentation
1756-------------
1757
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001758- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001759
1760 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001761 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001762
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001763 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001764
1765 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1766
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001767- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001768
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001769Tests
1770-----
1771
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001772- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001773 platforms that use the Makefile.
1774
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001775- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1776 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1777 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1778
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001779
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001780What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1781=================================
1782
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001783*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001784
1785Core and builtins
1786-----------------
1787
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001788- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1789 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1790 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1791 objects now (one object instead of three).
1792
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001793- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1794 Windows DLLs.
1795
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001796- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1797 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001798
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001799- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1800 a new .pyc magic.
1801
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001802- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1803 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1804 be there.
1805
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001806- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1807 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1808 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1809
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001810- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1811 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1812 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1813
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001814- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1815
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001816- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1817 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1818 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001819
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001820- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1821 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1822
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001823- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1824
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001825- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001826 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001827
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001828- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1829
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001830- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1831
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001832- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1833 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1834
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001835- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1836 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1837 Fixes bug #858016 .
1838
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001839- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1840 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1841 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1842
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001843- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1844 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1845 improves their performance (about 35%).
1846
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001847- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1848 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1849 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1850
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001851- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1852 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1853 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1854 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1855
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001856- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1857 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001858 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001859 length is not known).
1860
1861- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1862 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001863 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1864 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001865 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1866
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001867- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1868 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1869
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001870- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1871 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1872 keyword arguments.
1873
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001874- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1875 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1876 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1877
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001878- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1879 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1880 cases.
1881
1882- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1883 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1884 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1885 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1886 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1887 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1888 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1889 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1890 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1891 a release build.
1892
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001893- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1894 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1895
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001896- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001897 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001898
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001899- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1900 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1901 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1902 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1903 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1904 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1905 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1906 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1907 destroyed.
1908
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001909- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1910 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1911 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1912 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1913 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1914 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1915 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1916 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1917
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001918- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1919 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1920 character other than a space.
1921
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001922- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1923 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1924 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1925 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1926 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1927 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1928 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1929 attributes with the same name.
1930
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001931- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1932 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1933 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1934 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1935 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1936 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1937 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1938 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1939 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1940 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1941 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1942 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1943 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1944 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001945
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001946- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1947 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1948 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1949 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1950 This has been repaired.
1951
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001952- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1953
1954- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1955
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001956- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1957 over a sequence.
1958
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001959- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001960 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001961
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001962- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1963
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001964- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1965 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1966 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1967 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1968 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1969 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1970 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1971 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1972
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001973- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1974 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1975 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1976
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001977- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1978 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1979 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1980 freelist.
1981
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001982- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1983 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1984
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001985- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1986 number.
1987
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001988- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1989 a TypeError exception.
1990
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001991- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1992 820195.
1993
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001994- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1995 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1996 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1997
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001998- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001999 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2000 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002001
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002002- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2003 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2004 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2005
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002006- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2007 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002008 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002009
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002010- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002011 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2012 the first call.
2013
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002014
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002015Extension modules
2016-----------------
2017
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002018- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2019 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2020
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002021- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2022 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2023 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2024 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2025 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2026 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2027 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002028
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002029- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2030
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002031- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2032
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002033- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2034 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2035
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002036- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2037 fewer false positives.
2038
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002039- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2040 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2041
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002042- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002043 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2044
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002045- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002046 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002047 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002048 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2049 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002050
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002051- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2052 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2053 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2054 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2055
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002056- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2057 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2058 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2059 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2060 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2061 #897625.
2062
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002063- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2064 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2065
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002066- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2067 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2068 and pops on either side of the deque.
2069
2070- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2071 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2072
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002073- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2074 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2075 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2076 other functions that expect a function argument.
2077
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002078- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2079
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002080- os.getsid was added.
2081
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002082- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2083 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2084 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2085
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002086- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2087
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002088- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2089
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002090- readline.clear_history was added.
2091
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002092- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2093
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002094- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2095
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002096- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2097
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002098- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2099
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002100- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2101
2102- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2103
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002104- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2105
2106- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2107
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002108- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2109 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2110 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2111
2112- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2113 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2114 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2115 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2116 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2117 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2118 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2119
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002120- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2121 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2122 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2123 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002124
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002125- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002126 iterators from a single iterable.
2127
2128- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2129 of raising a TypeError exception.
2130
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002131- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2132 as parameter.
2133
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002134Library
2135-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002136
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002137- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2138 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2139 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2140 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2141
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002142- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2143
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002144- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2145 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2146 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002147
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002148- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2149 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2150 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002151
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002152- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002153
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002154- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2155 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002156
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002157- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2158 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2159
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002160- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2161
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002162- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002163 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002164
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002165- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002166 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002167
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002168- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2169
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002170- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2171 on cygwin and mingw32.
2172
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002173- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2174
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002175- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2176 module.
2177
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002178- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2179 installation scheme for all platforms.
2180
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002181- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002182 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002183
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002184- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2185 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2186 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2187
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002188- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2189 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2190 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2191
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002192- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2193
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002194- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2195
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002196- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2197 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2198
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002199- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2200 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2201 type pattern with the same value exists.
2202
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002203- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2204 when run from the command prompt).
2205
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002206- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2207 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2208
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002209- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2210 default sort).
2211
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002212- Added global runctx function to profile module
2213
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002214- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2215
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002216- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2217
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002218- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2219
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002220- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002221 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2222 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2223 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2224 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2225 accordingly.
2226
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002227- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2228 decoding standards.
2229
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002230- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2231 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2232 called for all requests.
2233
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002234- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2235 they are passed to the compiler.
2236
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002237- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2238 indent, width and depth.
2239
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002240- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2241 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2242
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002243- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2244 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2245
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002246- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2247
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002248- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2249
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002250- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2251
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002252- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2253 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2254
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002255- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002256 for better performance.
2257
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002258- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002259
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002260- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2261 a string).
2262
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002263- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2264
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002265- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2266
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002267- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2268
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002269- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2270
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002271- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2272 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2273 list of fieldnames.
2274
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002275- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2276 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2277
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002278- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2279
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002280- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2281 empty lists.
2282
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002283- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2284 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2285 and shelves.
2286
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002287- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2288 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2289
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002290- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002291 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2292 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002293
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002294- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2295 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002296 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002297
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002298- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002299 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2300 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2301
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002302- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2303 and removed in Py2.4.
2304
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002305- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2306
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002307- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2308
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002309Tools/Demos
2310-----------
2311
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002312- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2313 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2314
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002315- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2316
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002317- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2318 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2319 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2320 destination in situations where both files are given.
2321
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002322- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2323 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2324 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2325 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2326
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002327- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2328
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002329- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2330 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2331 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2332 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2333 now.
2334
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002335- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2336 in effect
2337
2338- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2339 C-c C-h
2340
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002341- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2342 -d option was given.
2343
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002344Build
2345-----
2346
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002347- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2348 build under OS X.
2349
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002350- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2351 --enable-profiling.
2352
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002353- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2354 is configured --with-tsc.
2355
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002356- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2357 on AMD64.
2358
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002359- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2360 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2361
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002362- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2363 removed.
2364
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002365- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2366 supported (see PEP 11).
2367
2368- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2369
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002370- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2371
2372- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2373 (see PEP 11).
2374
2375- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2376 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2377
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002378C API
2379-----
2380
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002381- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2382 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2383 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2384
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002385- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2386 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2387 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2388 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2389
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002390- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2391 generator objects.
2392
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002393- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2394 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002395 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2396 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002397
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002398- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2399 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2400
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002401- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2402 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2403 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2404 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2405 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2406
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002407- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2408 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2409 about 10% faster.
2410
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002411- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2412 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2413
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002414- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2415 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2416 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2417 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2418
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002419Windows
2420-------
2421
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002422- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2423 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2424 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2425 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2426
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002427- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2428 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2429 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2430
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002431
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002432What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2433===============================
2434
2435*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2436
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002437IDLE
2438----
2439
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002440- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2441 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2442 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2443 context-menu actions.
2444
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002445- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2446 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2447 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2448 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2449 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2450 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2451 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2452 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2453 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2454
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002455
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002456What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2457=============================================
2458
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002459*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002460
2461Core and builtins
2462-----------------
2463
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002464- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002465 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002466 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2467
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002468Extension modules
2469-----------------
2470
2471- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2472 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2473 than once. This has been fixed.
2474
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002475- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2476 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2477 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2478 call.
2479
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002480- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2481
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002482Library
2483-------
2484
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002485- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2486 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2487
2488- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2489 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2490 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2491 restored.
2492
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002493IDLE
2494----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002495
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002496- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002497
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002498Build
2499-----
2500
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002501- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2502 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2503
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002504C API
2505-----
2506
2507Windows
2508-------
2509
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002510- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2511 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2512
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002513- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2514
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002515Mac
2516---
2517
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002518- Various fixes to pimp.
2519
2520- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2521
2522- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2523 more problems than it solves.
2524
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002525
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002526What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2527=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002528
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002529*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2530
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002531Core and builtins
2532-----------------
2533
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002534- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2535 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2536
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002537- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2538 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002539 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002540
2541- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2542 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2543 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002544 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002545
2546- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2547 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002548
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002549- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2550 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2551 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2552
2553- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002554 770247.
2555
2556- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002557
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002558Extension modules
2559-----------------
2560
2561- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2562 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2563
2564- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2565
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002566- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2567
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002568- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2569 contained within the _strptime module.
2570
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002571- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2572 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2573
2574- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002575 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2576
2577- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2578 the find_class attribute, if present.
2579
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002580- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002581
2582 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2583 (SF bug 763298).
2584
2585 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002586 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2587 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2588 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002589
2590 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2591
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002592Library
2593-------
2594
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002595- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2596
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002597- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2598 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2599 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2600 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2601 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2602 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2603 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2604 or Tester().
2605
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002606- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2607 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2608 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2609 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2610 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2611 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2612 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2613 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2614 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002615
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002616 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002617
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002618- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2619 weren't before was an oversight.
2620
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002621- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2622 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2623
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002624- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2625 when there are no lines.
2626
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002627- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2628 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2629
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002630- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2631 to child processes.
2632
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002633- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2634
2635- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2636
2637- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2638 xmlrpclib.
2639
2640- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2641 responses.
2642
2643- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2644 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2645
2646- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2647 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2648 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2649
2650- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2651 used as patterns.
2652
2653- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2654 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2655 than Tk 8.3.
2656
2657- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2658
2659- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002660
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002661Tools/Demos
2662-----------
2663
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002664- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2665
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002666- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2667
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002668- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002669
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002670Build
2671-----
2672
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002673- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2674
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002675- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2676
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002677- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2678 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002679
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002680- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2681 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2682 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002683
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002684C API
2685-----
2686
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002687- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2688 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2689
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002690Windows
2691-------
2692
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002693- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2694 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2695 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2696 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2697 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2698 Python exception ::
2699
2700 thread.error: can't start new thread
2701
2702 is raised now.
2703
2704- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2705 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2706 instead of from DLL teardown.
2707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002708Mac
2709---
2710
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002711- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002712 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002713 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2714 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2715 the executable in the bundle.
2716
2717- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002718
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002719- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2720
2721- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2722 on Panther.
2723
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002724What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2725================================
2726
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002727*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002728
2729Core and builtins
2730-----------------
2731
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002732- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2733 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2734 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2735 with the -i option.
2736
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002737- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2738 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2739
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002740- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2741 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2742
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002743- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2744 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2745 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2746 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2747 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2748 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2749 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2750 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2751 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2752 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2753 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2754 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2755 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002756
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002757- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2758 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2759 embedded in a lambda expression.
2760
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002761- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2762 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2763 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2764 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2765 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2766
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002767- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2768 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2769 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2770
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002771- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2772 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2773
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002774- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2775 It's writable again.
2776
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002777- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2778 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2779 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002780 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002781
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002782- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2783 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2784 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2785
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002786Extension modules
2787-----------------
2788
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002789- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2790 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2791
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002792- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2793 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2794 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2795 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2796
2797- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2798 collection.
2799
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002800- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2801 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2802 unique within a single program run.
2803
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002804- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2805 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2806
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002807- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2808 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2809
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002810- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2811 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002812
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002813- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2814
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002815- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2816 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2817
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002818- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2819 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2820 for many BSD-derived systems.
2821
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002822
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002823Library
2824-------
2825
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002826- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2827 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2828 primary ones:
2829
2830 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2831 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2832 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2833
2834 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2835 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2836 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2837 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2838 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2839 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2840
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002841- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2842 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2843 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2844 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2845 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2846 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2847 argument.
2848
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002849- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2850 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2851 in the archive.
2852
2853- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2854 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2855
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002856- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2857 569574).
2858
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002859- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2860 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2861 no more.
2862
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002863- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2864 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2865 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2866 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2867 code coverage.
2868
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002869- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2870 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2871 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002872 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2873 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002874
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002875- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2876 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2877 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002878 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002879
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002880- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2881
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002882- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2883 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2884 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2885 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2886
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002887- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2888 handling.
2889
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002890- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2891 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2892
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002893- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2894 in socket.py.
2895
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002896- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2897
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002898- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2899 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2900 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2901 opener with proxy support.
2902
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002903- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2904
2905- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002907Tools/Demos
2908-----------
2909
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002910- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2911
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002912- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2913
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002914- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2915 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002916
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002917- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2918 files.
2919
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002920Build
2921-----
2922
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002923- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002924 different root directory.
2925
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002926C API
2927-----
2928
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002929- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2930 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2931 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2932 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2933 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2934 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2935 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2936 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2937 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2938 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2939
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002940- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2941 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2942 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2943 from Python.
2944
2945
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002946New platforms
2947-------------
2948
2949None this time.
2950
2951Tests
2952-----
2953
2954- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2955 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2956
2957Windows
2958-------
2959
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002960- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2961
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002962- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2963 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2964 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2965 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2966 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2967 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2968 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2969 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2970 that's what it's for.
2971
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002972Mac
2973---
2974
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002975- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2976 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2977 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2978 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002979- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2980 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2981- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002982
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002983SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2984------------------------------------
2985
2986430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2987598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2988622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2989661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2990683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2991697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2992713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2993724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2994727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2995729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2996730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2997731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2998732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2999733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3000735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3001740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3002744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3003745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3004747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3005749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3006751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3007753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3008755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3009757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3010760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3011
3012
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003013What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3014================================
3015
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003016*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003017
3018Core and builtins
3019-----------------
3020
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003021- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3022 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3023
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003024- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3025 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3026 and cannot be strings).
3027
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003028- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3029 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3030 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3031 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3032
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003033- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3034 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3035 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3036 Python itself.
3037
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003038- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3039 the referenced object, if it has one.
3040
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003041- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3042 the thread started at
3043 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3044
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003045- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3046 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3047 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3048 placed on a list index.
3049
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003050- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3051 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3052 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3053 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3054
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003055- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3056 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3057 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3058 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3059 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3060 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3061 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3062
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003063- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3064 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3065 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3066 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3067 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3068
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003069- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3070 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003071
3072- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3073 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3074 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3075 #693195.)
3076
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003077- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3078 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003079
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003080- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003081 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003082 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3083 interpreter executions, would fail.
3084
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003085- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003086 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003087 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003088
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003089Extension modules
3090-----------------
3091
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003092- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3093 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3094 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3095 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3096
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003097- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3098 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3099
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003100- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3101 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3102 and Greg Chapman.)
3103
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003104- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3105 recursively.
3106
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003107- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003108 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3109 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3110 leaks.
3111
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003112- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3113
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003114- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3115 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3116 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3117 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3118 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3119 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3120 #705836.
3121
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003122- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003123 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3124
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003125- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3126 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3127 See SF bug #692416.
3128
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003129- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3130 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3131
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003132- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3133 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3134 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003135
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003136- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003137 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3138 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3139
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003140- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3141 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3142 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3143 timeouts to work properly.
3144
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003145Library
3146-------
3147
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003148- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3149 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3150 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3151 future release.
3152
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003153- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3154 for querying platform dependent features.
3155
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003156- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003157
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003158- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3159 pickle protocol versions.
3160
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003161- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3162 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3163 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3164
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003165- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3166
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003167- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3168 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3169 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3170 modules.
3171
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003172- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3173 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3174 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3175
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003176- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3177 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3178
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003179- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3180 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3181 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3182
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003183- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003184 MS Office extensions.
3185
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003186- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3187 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3188
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003189- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3190 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3191
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003192- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3193 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3194 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3195 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3196 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3197 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3198
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003199- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3200 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3201 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003202
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003203- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3204 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3205 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3206
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003207- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3208
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003209- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3210 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3211 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3212
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003213Tools/Demos
3214-----------
3215
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003216- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3217 See the module docstring for details.
3218
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003219Build
3220-----
3221
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003222- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3223 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003224
3225C API
3226-----
3227
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003228- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3229
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003230- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3231 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3232 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3233
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003234- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3235 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003236
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003237 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3238 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3239 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003240
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003241- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003242 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3243
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003244- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3245 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3246 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003247
3248New platforms
3249-------------
3250
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003251None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003252
3253Tests
3254-----
3255
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003256- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3257 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003258
3259Windows
3260-------
3261
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003262- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3263 function.
3264
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003265- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3266 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003267
3268Mac
3269---
3270
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003271- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3272 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003273
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003274- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3275 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003276
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003277- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3278 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3279 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003280
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003281- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003282 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3283 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003284
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003285- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3286 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003287
3288
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003289What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3290=================================
3291
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003292*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003293
3294Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003295-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003296
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003297- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3298 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3299 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3300
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003301- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3302 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3303 (SF patch #664376.)
3304
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003305- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3306 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3307 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3308 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3309 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3310 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003311 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003312
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003313- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3314 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3315 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3316 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003317 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003318
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003319- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3320 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3321 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3322 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3323 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3324 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3325 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3326 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3327 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3328 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3329 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3330
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003331- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3332 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3333 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3334 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3335 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3336 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3337
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003338- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3339 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3340
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003341- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3342 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3343 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3344 case.)
3345
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003346- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3347 passed as unicode strings.
3348
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003349- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3350 See SF bug #683467.
3351
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003352- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3353 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3354
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003355- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3356
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003357- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3358
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003359- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3360 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3361 arguments.
3362
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003363- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3364 See SF bug #667147.
3365
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003366- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003367 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003368 See SF bug #676155.
3369
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003370- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003371 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003372 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3373 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3374 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3375 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3376 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3377 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003378
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003379Extension modules
3380-----------------
3381
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003382- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3383 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3384 tp_as_number pointer.
3385
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003386- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3387 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3388 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3389 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3390 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3391
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003392- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3393
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003394- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3395
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003396- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003397 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003398 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3399 patch #678531.)
3400
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003401- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3402 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3403
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003404- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3405 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3406
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003407- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3408
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003409- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3410 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3411 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3412
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003413- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3414
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003415- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3416 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3417
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003418- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003419
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003420- datetime changes:
3421
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003422 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3423
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003424 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3425 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3426 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3427 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3428 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3429 now.
3430
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003431 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003432 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3433 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003434
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003435 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003436 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003437 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3438 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3439 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3440 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003441
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003442 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3443 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3444 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003445 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3446
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003447 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3448 by a later example coded by Guido.
3449
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003450 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003451 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3452 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3453 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003454 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3455 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3456
3457 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3458 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3459 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3460 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3461 tzinfo subclass instance.
3462
3463 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3464 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3465 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3466 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3467 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3468 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3469 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3470 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003471
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003472 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3473 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3474 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3475 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3476 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003477 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3478
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003479 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003480
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003481 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3482 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3483 as a naive datetime object.
3484
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003485 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3486 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3487 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3488
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003489 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3490 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3491 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3492 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3493 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3494 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3495 comparison.
3496
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003497 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3498 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3499 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3500 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003501 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003502
3503 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003504
3505 and ::
3506
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003507 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3508
3509 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3510 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3511 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3512 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3513
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003514 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3515 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3516 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3517 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3518 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3519
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003520 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3521 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003522 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3523 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003525Library
3526-------
3527
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003528- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3529 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3530
3531- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3532 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3533 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3534 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3535 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3536 See PEP 307 for details.
3537
3538- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3539 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3540
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003541- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3542 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003543 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003544 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3545 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003546 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003547
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003548- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3549 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3550
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003551- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3552 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3553 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3554
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003555- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3556
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003557- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3558 exception.
3559
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003560- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3561 class.
3562
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003563- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3564 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3565 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3566
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003567- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3568 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3569
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003570- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003571 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3572 See SF bug #659228.
3573
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003574- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3575 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3576 See SF patch #651082.
3577
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003578- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003579
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003580- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3581 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3582
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003583- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003584 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003585
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003586- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3587 DOS paths from other platforms.
3588
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003589Tools/Demos
3590-----------
3591
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003592- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3593 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3594 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3595 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3596 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3597 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3598 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3599 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3600 example:
3601
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003602 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3603 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003604
3605 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3606
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003607
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003608Build
3609-----
3610
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003611- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3612 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3613 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003614 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3615
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003616 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3617
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003618- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3619 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3620 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3621 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3622 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3623 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3624 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3625 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3626 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3627
3628- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3629 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3630 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3631 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3632
3633- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3634 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003636C API
3637-----
3638
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003639- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3640 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003641
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003642- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3643 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3644 tp_as_number pointer.
3645
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003646- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3647 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3648 (SF #681367)
3649
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003650- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3651 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3652 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3653 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003655Tests
3656-----
3657
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003658- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003659 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3660 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3661 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3662 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3663 pydoc.)
3664
3665- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3666
3667- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003668
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003669Windows
3670-------
3671
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003672- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3673 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3674 time).
3675
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003676- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3677 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3678
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003679- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3680 release without strong cryptography.
3681
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003682- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003683 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003684
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003685- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3686 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3687
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003688Mac
3689---
3690
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003691- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3692 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003693
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003694- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3695 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3696 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003697
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003698- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3699 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003700
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003701- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3702 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3703 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3704 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003705
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003706- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003707 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3708 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3709 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003710
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003711
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003712What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003713=================================
3714
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003715*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003719
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003720- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3721
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003722- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3723 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003724 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003725 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003726 a different meaning than before.
3727
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003728- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003729 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003730 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003731
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003732- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003733 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003734 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003735
3736- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3737 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3738 and deallocation.
3739
3740- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3741 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3742
3743- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3744 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3745 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3746 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3747 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3748
3749- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3750 now detected by the garbage collector.
3751
3752- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3753 [SF bug 519621]
3754
3755- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3756 identifier.
3757
3758- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3759 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3760 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3761 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3762 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3763 [SF bug 563060]
3764
3765- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3766 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3767 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3768 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3769 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3770
3771- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3772 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3773 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3774
3775- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3776
3777- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3778 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3779 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3780 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3781 state of the slots would be lost.)
3782
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003783Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003785
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003786- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003787 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3788 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3789 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3790 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003791 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3792 Jython 2.1.
3793
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003794- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003795 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003796 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3797 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3798 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3799 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3800 these, see PEP 302.
3801
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003802- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3803 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3804 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3805
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003806- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3807 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3808 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3809
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003810- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3811 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3812 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3813
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003814- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3815 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3816 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3817 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3818 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3819 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3820 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3821 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3822 releases or implementations.
3823
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003824- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003825 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3826 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003827
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003828- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3829 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3830
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003831- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3832 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3833 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3834
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003835- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3836 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3837
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003838- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3839 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003840 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3841 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003842
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003843- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3844 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3845 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3846 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3847 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3848
3849 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3850 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3851 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3852 pattern.
3853
3854 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3855 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3856 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3857 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3858
3859 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3860 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3861 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3862 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3863 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3864 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3865
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003866- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3867 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3868 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3869 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3870 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3871 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3872 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3873 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003874
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003875- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3876 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3877 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3878 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3879 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003880 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3881 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3882 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3883 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3884 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3885 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3886 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003887
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003888- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3889 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3890
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003891- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3892 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3893 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3894 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3895 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3896 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3897 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3898 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3899 to Zack Weinberg!
3900
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003901- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3902 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3903 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3904 type. This has been fixed now.
3905
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003906- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3907 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3908 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3909
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003910- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3911 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3912 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3913 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3914 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3915 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3916 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3917 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003918 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003919
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003920- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3921 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3922 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003923
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003924- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3925 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3926 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3927 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3928 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3929 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3930 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3931 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003932 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003933 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3934 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3935
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003936- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3937 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3938 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3939 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3940 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3941 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3942 this.)
3943
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003944- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3945 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003946 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003947 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003948 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3949 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003950 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3951 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003952
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003953- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3954 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3955 currently running.
3956
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003957- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3958 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3959 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3960 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3961
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003962- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3963 as directory names.
3964
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003965- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3966 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3967
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003968- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3969 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3970
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003971- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003972 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3973 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003974
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003975- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3976 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3977 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3978 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3979 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3980
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003981- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3982 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3983 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3984 removed.
3985
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003986- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3987 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3988 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3989
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003990- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3991 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3992 to __debug__.
3993
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003994- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3995 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3996 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3997
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003998- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3999 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4000 deprecated now.
4001
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004002- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4003 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4004 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004005
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004006- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4007 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4008 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4009 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4010 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004011
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004012- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4013 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4014
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004015- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4016 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4017 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004018 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004019 is backward compatible.
4020
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004021- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4022 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4023 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4024 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4025 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4026
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004027- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4028 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4029 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4030 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4031 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4032 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004033
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004034- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4035 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4036
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004037- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4038 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4039
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004040- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4041 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4042 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4043 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4044 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4045
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004046- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4047 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4048 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4049
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004050- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004051 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4052
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004053- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4054 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4055 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004056
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004057- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4058 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4059
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004060- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4061 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4062 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4063
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004064- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004066Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004068
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004069- Added three operators to the operator module:
4070 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4071 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4072 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4073
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004074- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4075
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004076- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4077 archives.
4078
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004079- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4080 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4081 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4082
4083 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4084
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004085- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4086 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4087 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004088 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004089
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004090- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4091 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4092 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4093 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004094 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4095 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4096 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4097 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004098
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004099- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4100 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004101
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004102- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4103
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004104- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4105 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4106
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004107- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4108 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4109 supported.
4110
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004111- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4112
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004113- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4114 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004115
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004116- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4117 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4118
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004119- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4120
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004121- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4122 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4123
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004124- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4125 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4126 functions but callable type objects.
4127
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004128- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004129 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004130 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004131
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004132- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4133 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004134
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004135- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4136 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004137
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004138- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4139 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4140 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4141 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4142
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004143- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4144 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004145
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004146- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4147 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4148 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4149 and __imul__.
4150
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004151- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004152 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4153 is called.
4154
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004155- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4156 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4157 interpreter was compiled.
4158
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004159- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4160 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4161 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004162 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004163 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4164 1, not 2.
4165
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004166- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4167 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4168 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4169 limit.
4170
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004171- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4172 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4173 bug #623464.
4174
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004175- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4176 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4177 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4178 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4179
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004180Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004182
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004183- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4184
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004185- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4186 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4187 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4188 with Python 2.3a2.
4189
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004190- os.path exposes getctime.
4191
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004192- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004193 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004194 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004195 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004196 unit tests of floating point results.
4197
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004198- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4199 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4200 has been increased.
4201
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004202- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4203 executed.
4204
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004205- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4206 postinstallation script.
4207
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004208- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4209 test the current module.
4210
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004211- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004212 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4213 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4214 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4215 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4216
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004217- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004218 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004219 Ward's Optik package.
4220
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004221- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4222 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4223 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4224 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4225
4226- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4227 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004228 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004229
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004230- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4231 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4232 shelf are binary pickles.
4233
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004234- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4235 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4236
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004237- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4238 modules are iterators now.
4239
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004240- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4241 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4242 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4243 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4244 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4245 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004246
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004247- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4248 with their entity value.
4249
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004250- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4251
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004252- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4253 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004254
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004255- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4256 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004257 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004258
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004259- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4260 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4261 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4262 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4263 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4264 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4265 main():
4266
4267 import locale
4268 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4269
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004270- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4271 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4272
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004273- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4274 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4275 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4276 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4277 to the new standard.
4278
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004279- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4280 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4281 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4282 an extension to the database.
4283
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004284- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4285 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4286 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4287 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004288 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004289
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004290- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004291 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004292
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004293- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4294 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4295 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4296 bounded integers.
4297
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004298- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4299 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4300 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4301 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4302 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4303 in existence.
4304
4305 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4306 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4307 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4308 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4309 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4310 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4311
4312 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4313 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4314 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4315 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4316
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004317- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4318 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4319 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4320
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004321- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4322
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004323- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4324 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4325 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4326 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4327
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004328- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4329 argument.
4330
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004331- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4332 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4333 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4334 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4335 [SF patch 560794].
4336
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004337- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4338 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4339 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004340 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4341 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4342 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004343
4344- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4345 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004346
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004347- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4348 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4349 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4350 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004351
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004352- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4353 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4354 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4355 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4356 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4357
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004358- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004359
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004360- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4361
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004362- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4363 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4364 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4365 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4366 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4367 identical to None.
4368
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004369- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4370 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4371 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4372 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4373 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4374 results now.
4375
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004376- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4377 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4378
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004379- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4380 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4381 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4382 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4383 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4384 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4385 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4386 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4387
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004388- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4389
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004390- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4391 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4392
4393- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4394 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4395 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4396 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4397 and other systems.
4398
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004399- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4400 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4401 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4402 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 +00004403 work well with these.
4404
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004405- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4406
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004407- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004408 connections.
4409
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004410- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4411 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4412 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4413
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004414- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4415 sets
4416
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004417- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4418 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4419 name.
4420
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004421- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4422 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4423 passed in.
4424
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004425- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004426 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004427 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4428 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004429
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004430- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4431
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004432- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4433
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004434- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4435 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4436 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4437
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004438- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4439 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4440 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4441 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004442 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004443
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004444- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004445 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004446 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004447
4448- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4449 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4450 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4451
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004452- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004453 the value of its expression argument.
4454
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004455- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4456 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4457 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4458
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004459- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4460 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4461 skipstone browser was included.
4462
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004463- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4464 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4465
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004466Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004468
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004469- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4470 names in addition to accepting file names.
4471
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004472- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4473 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4474 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4475 still used and useful.)
4476
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004477- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4478 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4479 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4480 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004481
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004482- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4483 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4484 the generated binary.
4485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004486Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004488
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004489- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4490
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004491- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4492 except in the hands of experts.
4493
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004494- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004495 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4496 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4497 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004498
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004499- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4500 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4501 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4502 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4503 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4504 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4505 builds.
4506
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004507- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4508 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4509 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4510 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4511 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4512 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4513 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4514 new type.
4515
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004516- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004517
4518 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4519 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4520 positive infinities.
4521
4522 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4523 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4524 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4525 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4526 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4527 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4528 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4529
4530 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4531
4532 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4533
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004534- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4535 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4536 size of the executable.
4537
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004538- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4539 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4540 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4541 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004542
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004543- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4544
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004545- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4546 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4547 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004548
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004549- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4550 well as Unix.
4551
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004552- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4553 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4554 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4555 modules in the README file for details.
4556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004557C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004559
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004560- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4561 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004562 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004563 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004564 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004565
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004566- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4567 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4568 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4569 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4570 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4571 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004572 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004573 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4574 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4575 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4576 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4577 aligned.)
4578
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004579- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4580 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4581 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4582
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004583- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4584 level.
4585
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004586- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4587 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4588 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4589 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4590 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4591
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004592- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4593 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4594 code.
4595
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004596- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4597 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4598 adjusting for negative indices.
4599
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004600- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4601 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4602 object.
4603
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004604- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4605 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4606 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4607
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004608- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4609 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004610
4611- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4612
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004613- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4614 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4615 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4616 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4617
4618- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4619
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004620- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004621
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004622- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004623 without going through the buffer API.
4624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004626
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004627- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4628 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4629 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4630 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4631
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004632- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4633 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4634
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004635- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004636 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4637
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004638New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004640
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004641- OpenVMS is now supported.
4642
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004643- AtheOS is now supported.
4644
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004645- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4646
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004647- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4648
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004649Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----
4651
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004652- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4653 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4654 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004655
4656Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004658
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004659- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4660 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4661 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4662 bugs.
4663 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004664 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004665 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4666 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004667 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004668
4669- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004670 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004671
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004672- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4673 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4674
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004675- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4676 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004677 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004678 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4679
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004680- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4681 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4682 use files" uninstall option).
4683
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004684- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4685
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004686- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4687 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4688
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004689- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4690 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4691 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4692
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004693- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4694 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4695 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4696 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4697 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004698 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4699 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4700 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004701
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004702- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004703 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004704 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4705 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4706 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4707 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4708 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4709 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4710 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4711 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4712 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4713 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4714 work around.
4715
4716- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4717 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4718 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4719 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4720 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4721 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4722 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4723 specified with O_CREAT too).
4724
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004725Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726----
4727
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004728- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004729
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004730- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4731 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4732 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4733
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004734- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4735 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4736 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4737
4738- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4739 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4740 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4741 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4742 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4743 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4744 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4745 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004746
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004747- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4748 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4749 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004750
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004751- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4752 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4753 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4754 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4755 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004756
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004757- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4758 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4759 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004760
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004761- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4762 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004763
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004764- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4765 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4766 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4767 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4768 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004769
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004770- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4771 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4772 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4773
4774- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4775 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4776 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004777
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004778- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4779 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4780 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4781 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004782 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004783
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004784- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4785 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004786
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004787- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4788 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004789
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004790- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004791 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004792 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4793 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004794
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004795
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004796What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004797===============================
4798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4800
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004801Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004803
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004804- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4805 with a custom metaclass.
4806
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004807Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004809
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004810- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4811 are proxies.
4812
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004813Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004815
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004816- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4817 very short strings.
4818
4819- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4820 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4821 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4822 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4823 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4824
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004825Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004827
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004828- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4829 close or delete time).
4830
4831- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4832 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4833
4834- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4835
4836- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004837 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004838
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004839Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004841
4842Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004844
4845C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004847
4848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004850
4851Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004853
4854Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004856
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004857- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4858
4859- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4860 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4861
4862- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4863 deleted at process exit time.
4864
4865- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4866 in backslash.
4867
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004868Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004870
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004871- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4872 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4873 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4874
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004875
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004876What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004877===========================
4878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4880
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004881Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004883
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004884- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4885 been extensively updated. See
4886
4887 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4888
4889 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4890
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004891- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4892 deleted!
4893
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004894- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4895 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4896 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4897 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4898 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4899
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004900- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4901
4902 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4903 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4904
4905 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4906 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4907 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4908 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4909 supported anyway.
4910
4911 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4912 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4913
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004914- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4915 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4916 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4917 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4918 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004919
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004920- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4921 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4922 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4923
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004924Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004926
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004927- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4928 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4929 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4930 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4931 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4932 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004933 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4934 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4935 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4936 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004937
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004938- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4939 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4940 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4941
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004942Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004944
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004945- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4946
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004947Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004949
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004950- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4951 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4952 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4953 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4954 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4955 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4956
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004957- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4958
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004959- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4960
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004961- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4962
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004963- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4964 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4965 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4966
4967- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4968
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004969Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004971
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004972- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4973 off a search on Google.
4974
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004975Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004977
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004978- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4979 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4980 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4981 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4982 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4983 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4984 other platforms should do likewise.
4985
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004986- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4987 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4988 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4989
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004990C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004992
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004993- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4994 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4995 producing key-value pairs.
4996
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004997- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004998 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004999 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5000 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5001 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5002 previously went unchallenged.
5003
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005004New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005006
5007Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005009
5010Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005012
5013Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005015
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005016- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5017 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005018
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005019- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5020 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5021 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5022 home.
5023
5024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005025What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005026===========================
5027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5029
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005030Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005032
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005033- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5034 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005035
5036 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005037 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005038
5039 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5040 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005041 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005042 This needs to be documented.
5043
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005044- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5045 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5046
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005047- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5048 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5049 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5050
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005051- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5052 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5053
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005054- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5055 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5056 class forbids it).
5057
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005058- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5059 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5060 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5061
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005062- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5063
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005064Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005066
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005067- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5068 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005069 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005070
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005071- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5072 (like 1 + '').
5073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005074Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005075-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005076
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005077- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5078 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5079 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5080 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005081 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005082 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5083
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005084- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5085 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5086 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5087 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5088
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005089- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5090 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005091 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5092 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5093 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005094
5095- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5096 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005097
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005098- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5099 bytes on its input.
5100
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005101Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005103
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005104- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005105 convenience function.
5106
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005107- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5108 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5109 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005110 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5111 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5112 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5113 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5114 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5115 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005116
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005117- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5118 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5119 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5120 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5121
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005122- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5123 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5124 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5125
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005126- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5127 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5128 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5129 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5130
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005131- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5132 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005134 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5135 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5136 new -l and -e options.
5137
5138- statcache is now deprecated.
5139
5140- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5141 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005143 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5144 time properly taken into account.
5145
5146- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5147 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5148 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5149 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5150
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005151Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005153
5154Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005156
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005157- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5158 is built with libdb3 if available.
5159
5160- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5161
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005162C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005164
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005165- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5166 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5167 PySequence_Size().
5168
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005169- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5170
5171- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5172 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5173 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5174
5175- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5176 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5177
5178- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5179 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5180
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005181New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005183
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005184- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5185 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5186
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005187- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5188 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5189
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005190- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5191
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005192Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005194
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005195- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5196 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5197
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005198Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005200
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005201Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005203
5204- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5205 removed completely in the next release.
5206
5207- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5208 OSX.
5209
5210- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5211 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5212
5213- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5214
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005215
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005216What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005217===========================
5218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5220
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005221Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005223
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005224- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005225 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005226 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005227 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5228 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005229 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5230 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005231 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5232 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005233
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005234- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5235 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5236
5237- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5238 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5239
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005240Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005242
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005243- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5244 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5245 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5246 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5247 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5248 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5249 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5250 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5251
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005252- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5253 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5254 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5255 example).
5256
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005257- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005258 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005259 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005260 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005261
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005262- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5263 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5264 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005265 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005266
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005267- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5268 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5269 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5270 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5271 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5272 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5273
5274 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5275
5276 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5277
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005278Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005280
5281- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5282
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005283- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5284
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005285- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5286 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005287
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005288- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5289 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5290 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5291 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5292 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5293 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005294 attributes.
5295
5296- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5297 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5298 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005299
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005300- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5301 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5302 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005303
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005304- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5305 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5306 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005307 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5308 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5309
5310- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5311 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005312
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005313Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005314-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005315
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005316- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5317 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5318
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005319- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5320 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5321 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5322 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5323
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005324- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5325 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5326 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5327 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5328
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005329 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5330 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5331 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5332 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5333 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5334 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5335 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5336 without losing information).
5337
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005338- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005339 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5340 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5341 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5342 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5343 module).
5344
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005345 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005346 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5347 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5348 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5349 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005350
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005351- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005352 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5353 encoding.
5354
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005355- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5356 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5357
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005359 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5360
5361- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5362 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5363 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5364 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5365
5366- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5367
5368- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5369 ON, and OFF.
5370
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005371- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5372 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5373
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005374Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005376
5377- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5378 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5379 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005380
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005381- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5382 been added: -X and -E.
5383
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005384Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005386
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005387- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5388 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5389
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005390C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005392
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005393- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5394 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5395 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5396 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5397 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5398
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005399- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5400 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5401 as long) arguments.
5402
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005403- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5404 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5405 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5406 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5407 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5408 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5409
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005410- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5411 input.
5412
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005413New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005414-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005415
5416Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005417-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005418
5419Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005421
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005422- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5423 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5424 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5425
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005426- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5427 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5428 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005429 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5432 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5433 import signal
5434 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005435
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005437 while 1:
5438 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005439 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005440 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5441 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5442 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5443 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005444
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005445
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005446What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5447===========================
5448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5450
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005451Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005453
5454- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5455 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5456 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5457
5458- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5459 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5460 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5461 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5462 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5463 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5464 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005465
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005466- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005467 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005468 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5469 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5470 associate a docstring with a property.
5471
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005472- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5473 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5474 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5475 other built-in object types.
5476
5477- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5478 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5479 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5480 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5481 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5482
5483- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5484 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5485
5486- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5487 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005488 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005489 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5490 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5491 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5492 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5493 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5494
5495- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5496 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5497 class.
5498
5499- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5500 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5501 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5502 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5503
5504- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5505 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5506 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5507 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5508
5509- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5510 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5511
5512- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5513 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5514 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5515 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5516 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005517 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005518 with the same value as s.
5519
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005520- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5521
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005522Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005523----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005524
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005525- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5526
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005527- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5528 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5529 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5530 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5531 objects.
5532
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005533- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5534 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005535 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5536 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5537
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005538- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5539 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5540 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5541
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005542Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005543-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005544
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005545- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5546 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5547 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5548 by the instances.
5549
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005550- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5551 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5552 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5553
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005554- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5555 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5556 before the entire comparison is complete.
5557
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005558- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5559 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5560 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5561
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005562- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5563 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5564 getwriter().
5565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005566- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5567 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5568
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005569- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005570 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5571 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5572
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005573- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5574 iterable object.
5575
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005576- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5577 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005578
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005579- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5580 authentication.
5581
5582- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5583 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005585- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005586 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5587 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5588 a sample driver.)
5589
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005590Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005592
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005593- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5594 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5595 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5596 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5597 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5598 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5599 kernel has large file support.
5600
5601- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5602 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5603 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5604 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5605 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5606
5607- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5608 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5609 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5610
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005611C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005613
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005614- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5615 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5616
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005617New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005618-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005619
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005620- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5621 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5622
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005623Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005624-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005625
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005626- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5627 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5628 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5629 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5630 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5631
5632- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5633 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5634 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5635 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5636
5637- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5638 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5639
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005640Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005641-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005642
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005643- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005644 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5645 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005646
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005647
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005648What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5649===========================
5650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005651*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5652
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005653Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005654----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005655
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005656- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5657 big to represent as a C double.
5658
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005659- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5660 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5661 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5662 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5663 restriction).
5664
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005665- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5666 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5667 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5668 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5669 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5670
5671 >>> dir([])
5672 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5673 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5674 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5675 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5676 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5677 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5678 'reverse', 'sort']
5679
5680 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5681
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005682- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005683 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5684 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5685 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5686 OverflowError exception.
5687
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005688- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005689 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005690 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5691 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5692 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5693 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5694 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005695 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5697 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5698
5699 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5700 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5701 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5702 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005703
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005704- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005705 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5706 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5707 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5708 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5709 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5710 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5711 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5712 once it is created.
5713
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005714- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5715 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5716 (key, value) pairs.
5717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005718- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005719 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5720 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5721
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005722- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5723 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5724 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5725 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5726 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005727
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005728- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005729 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5730 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5731
5732 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005734- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005735 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005737Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005738-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005740- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005741 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5742 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005743
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005744- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5745 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5746 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5747 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5748 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5749 in this area anymore).
5750
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005751- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5752 threading.Timer.
5753
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005754- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5755 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5756
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005757- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005758 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5759
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005760- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005761 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5762 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5763 converted to Python longs.
5764
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005765- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005766 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5767
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005768- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5769 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5770 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5771
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005772Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005773-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005774
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005775- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5776 division operators as per PEP 238.
5777
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005779-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005780
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005781- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5782 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5783 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5784 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5785
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005786C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005787-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005788
5789- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005790
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005791- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5792 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005793 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005795 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5796 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005797 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005798 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005799
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005800- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005801 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5802 module:
5803
5804 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005805
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005806 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5807 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005808
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005809 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5810 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005811
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005812 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5813
5814 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5815
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005816- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005817 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5818 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5819 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005820
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005821New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005822-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005823
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005824- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5825 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5826 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5827 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5828 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005829
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005830Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005831-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005832
5833Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005834-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005835
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005836- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5837 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5838 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5839 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005840 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5841 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5842 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5843 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5844 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005845
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005846- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005847 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5848
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005849
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005850What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5851===========================
5852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005853*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5854
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005855Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005856-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005857
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005858- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5859 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5860
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005861- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5862 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5863 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005864
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005865- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5866 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5867 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5868 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005869
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005870- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005872- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005873
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005874Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005875-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005876
5877- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005878 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005879 the module docstring for details.
5880
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005881Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005882-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005883
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005884- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005885 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5886 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5887 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005888
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005889- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5890 Nick Mathewson.
5891
5892Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005893----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005894
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005895- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5896 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5897 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5898 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5899 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5900 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5901 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5902 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5903
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005904- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5905 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5906 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5907 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5908
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005909- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5910 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5911 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5912 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5913 come a long way).
5914
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005915- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5916 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5917 write filters for these warnings).
5918
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005919- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5920 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5921 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5922 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5923 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5924
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005925- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5926 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5927 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5928 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5929 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5930 older distribution.
5931
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005932Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005933-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005934
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005935- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5936 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005937 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005938
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005939- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5940 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5941 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5942
5943- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5944
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005945- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5946
5947- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5948
5949- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005951- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005952
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005953- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5954
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005955New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005956-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005957
5958C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005959-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005960
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005961- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5962 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5963 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5964 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5965 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5966 against buffer overruns.
5967
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005968- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005969 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5970 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005971 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5972 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5973 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5974
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005975- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5976 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5977 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5978 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5979 deprecated.
5980
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005981Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005982-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005983
5984- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5985 relevant is found.
5986
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005987
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005988What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005989===========================
5990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005991*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5992
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005993Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005994----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005995
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005996- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5997 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5998 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5999 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6000 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6001 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6002 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6003 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006004 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006005 repaired.
6006
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006007- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006008 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006009 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6010 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6011 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6012 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6013 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6014 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6015 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6016 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6017
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006018- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6019 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6020 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6021 leading BMO character).
6022
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006023- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6024 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6025 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6026
6027 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6028 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6029 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006030
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006031 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6032 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6033 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6034 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6035 for various simple to use conversions.
6036
6037 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6038 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6039
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006040 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6041 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6042 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6043 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6044 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6045 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6046 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6047 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6048 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6049 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6050 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6051 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6052 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6053 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6054 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006055
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006056- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6057 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6058 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006059 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006060 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006061
6062 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006063 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6064 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6065 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6066 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6067 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006068 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6069 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006070
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006071 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6072 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6073 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006074 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006075
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006076- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6077 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6078 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6079 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6080 floating arithmetic,
6081
6082 x = 9007199254740992.0
6083 print long(x)
6084
6085 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6086 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6087 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6088 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6089 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6090 functions are of good quality).
6091
6092 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6093 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6094 algorithms to break.
6095
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006096- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6097 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6098 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6099 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6100 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6101 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6102 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6103 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6104 order.
6105
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006106- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6107 operation along the most common code paths.
6108
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006109- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6110 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6111
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006112- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6113 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6114 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6115 {}.update(UserDict())
6116
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006117- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6118 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6119 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6120 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6121 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6122 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6123 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6124 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6125
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006126- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006127 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006128
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006129 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006130 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6131 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006132 join() method of strings
6133 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006134 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6135 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006136 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006137 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006138
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006139- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6140 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6141
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006142- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6143 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6144
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006145- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6146 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6147 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6148 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6149
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006150- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6151 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006152 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006153 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6154 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006155
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006156- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6157
6158
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006159Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006160-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006161
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006162- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006163 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006164 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6165 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6166
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006167- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6168 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6169
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006170- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6171 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6172 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6173 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6174
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006175- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6176 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6177 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6178
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006179- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6180
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006181- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6182
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006183- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6184 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6185 that are still imported into string.py).
6186
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006187- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6188
6189- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6190 Now it does.
6191
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006192- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6193
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006194- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6195 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6196 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6197 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6198 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006199 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6200 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006201
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006202- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6203 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6204 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6205 'help(object)'.
6206
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006207Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006208-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006209
6210- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006211 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006212 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6213 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6214
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006215- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006216 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6217 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006218
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006219C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006220-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006221
6222- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6223 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006224
6225----
6226
6227**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**