blob: 661c2ca8c37fe5dac4de0516cd37129a92013007 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000015- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
16 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
17 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
18 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
19 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
20 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
21 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
22
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000023- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
24 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
25 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
26 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
27 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
28
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000029- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
30 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000031
32- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
33 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
34 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
35 #693195.)
36
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000037- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
38 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000039
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000040- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000041 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000042 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
43 interpreter executions, would fail.
44
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000045- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000046 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000047 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000048
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000049Extension modules
50-----------------
51
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000052- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
53 recursively.
54
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000055- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000056 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
57 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
58 leaks.
59
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000060- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
61
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000062- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
63 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
64 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
65 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
66 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
67 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
68 #705836.
69
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000070- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
71 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
72
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000073- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
74 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
75 See SF bug #692416.
76
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000077- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
78 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
79
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000080- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
81 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
82 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000083
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +000084- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
85 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
86 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
87 timeouts to work properly.
88
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000089Library
90-------
91
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000092- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
93 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
94
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +000095- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
96 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
97 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
98
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000099- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000100 MS Office extensions.
101
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000102- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
103 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
104
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000105- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
106 execution speed of expressions and statements.
107
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000108- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
109 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
110 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
111 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
112 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
113 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
114
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000115- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
116 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
117 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000118
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000119- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
120 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
121 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
122
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000123- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
124
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000125Tools/Demos
126-----------
127
128TBD
129
130Build
131-----
132
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000133- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
134 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000135
136C API
137-----
138
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000139- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
140
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000141- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000142 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
143
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000144- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
145 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
146 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000147
148New platforms
149-------------
150
151TBD
152
153Tests
154-----
155
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000156- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
157 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000158
159Windows
160-------
161
162TBD
163
164Mac
165---
166
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000167- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
168 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000169
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000170- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
171 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000172
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000173- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
174 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
175 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000176
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000177- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
178 be used by mere mortals.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000179
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000180- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
181 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000182
183
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000184What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
185=================================
186
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000187*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000188
189Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000190-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000191
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000192- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
193 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
194 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
195
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000196- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
197 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
198 (SF patch #664376.)
199
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000200- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
201 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
202 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
203 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
204 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
205 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000206 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000207
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000208- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
209 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
210 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
211 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000212 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000213
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000214- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
215 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
216 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
217 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
218 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
219 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
220 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
221 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
222 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
223 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
224 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
225
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000226- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
227 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
228 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
229 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
230 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
231 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
232
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000233- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
234 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
235
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000236- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
237 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
238 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
239 case.)
240
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000241- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
242 passed as unicode strings.
243
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000244- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
245 See SF bug #683467.
246
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000247- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
248 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
249
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000250- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
251
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000252- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
253
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000254- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
255 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
256 arguments.
257
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000258- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
259 See SF bug #667147.
260
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000261- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000262 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000263 See SF bug #676155.
264
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000265- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000266 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000267 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
268 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
269 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
270 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
271 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
272 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000273
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000274Extension modules
275-----------------
276
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000277- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
278 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
279 tp_as_number pointer.
280
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000281- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
282 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
283 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
284 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
285 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
286
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000287- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
288
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000289- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
290
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000291- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000292 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000293 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
294 patch #678531.)
295
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000296- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
297 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
298
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000299- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
300 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
301
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000302- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
303
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000304- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
305 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
306 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000308- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
309
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000310- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
311 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
312
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000313- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000314
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000315- datetime changes:
316
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000317 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
318 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
319 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
320 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
321 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
322 now.
323
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000324 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000325 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
326 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000327
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000328 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000329 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000330 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
331 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
332 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
333 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000334
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000335 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
336 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
337 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000338 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
339
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000340 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
341 by a later example coded by Guido.
342
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000343 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000344 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
345 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
346 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000347 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
348 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
349
350 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
351 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
352 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
353 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
354 tzinfo subclass instance.
355
356 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
357 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
358 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
359 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
360 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
361 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
362 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
363 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000364
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000365 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
366 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
367 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
368 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
369 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000370 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
371
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000372 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000373
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000374 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
375 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
376 as a naive datetime object.
377
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000378 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
379 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
380 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
381
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000382 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
383 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
384 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
385 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
386 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
387 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
388 comparison.
389
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000390 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
391 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
392 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
393 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000394 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000395
396 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000397
398 and ::
399
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000400 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
401
402 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
403 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
404 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
405 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
406
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000407 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
408 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
409 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
410 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
411 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
412
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000413 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
414 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000415 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
416 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000417
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000418Library
419-------
420
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000421- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
422 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
423
424- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
425 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
426 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
427 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
428 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
429 See PEP 307 for details.
430
431- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
432 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
433
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000434- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
435 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000436 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000437 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
438 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000439 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000440
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000441- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
442 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
443
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000444- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
445 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
446 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
447
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000448- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
449
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000450- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
451 exception.
452
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000453- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
454 class.
455
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000456- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
457 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
458 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
459
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000460- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
461 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
462
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000463- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000464 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
465 See SF bug #659228.
466
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000467- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
468 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
469 See SF patch #651082.
470
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000471- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000472
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000473- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
474 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
475
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000476- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000477 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000478
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000479- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
480 DOS paths from other platforms.
481
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000482Tools/Demos
483-----------
484
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000485- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
486 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
487 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
488 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
489 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
490 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
491 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
492 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
493 example:
494
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000495 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
496 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000497
498 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
499
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000500
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000501Build
502-----
503
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000504- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
505 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
506 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000507 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
508
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000509 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
510
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000511- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
512 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
513 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
514 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
515 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
516 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
517 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
518 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
519 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
520
521- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
522 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
523 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
524 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
525
526- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
527 from the Tools/scripts directory.
528
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000529C API
530-----
531
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000532- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
533 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000534
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000535- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
536 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
537 tp_as_number pointer.
538
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000539- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
540 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
541 (SF #681367)
542
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000543- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
544 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
545 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
546 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000547
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000548Tests
549-----
550
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000551- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000552 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
553 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
554 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
555 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
556 pydoc.)
557
558- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
559
560- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000562Windows
563-------
564
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000565- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
566 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
567 time).
568
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000569- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
570 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
571
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000572- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
573 release without strong cryptography.
574
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000575- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000576 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000577
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000578- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
579 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000581Mac
582---
583
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000584- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
585 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000586
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000587- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
588 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
589 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000590
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000591- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
592 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000593
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000594- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
595 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
596 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
597 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000598
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000599- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000600 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
601 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
602 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000603
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000604
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000605What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000606=================================
607
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000608*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000610Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000611--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000612
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000613- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
614
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000615- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
616 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000617 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000618 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000619 a different meaning than before.
620
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000621- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000622 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000623 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000624
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000625- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000626 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000627 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000628
629- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
630 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
631 and deallocation.
632
633- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
634 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
635
636- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
637 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
638 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
639 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
640 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
641
642- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
643 now detected by the garbage collector.
644
645- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
646 [SF bug 519621]
647
648- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
649 identifier.
650
651- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
652 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
653 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
654 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
655 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
656 [SF bug 563060]
657
658- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
659 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
660 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
661 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
662 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
663
664- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
665 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
666 not called. [SF bug #537450]
667
668- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
669
670- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
671 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
672 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
673 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
674 state of the slots would be lost.)
675
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000676Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000677-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000678
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000679- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000680 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
681 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
682 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
683 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000684 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
685 Jython 2.1.
686
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000687- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000688 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000689 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
690 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
691 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
692 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
693 these, see PEP 302.
694
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000695- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
696 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
697 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
698
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000699- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
700 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
701 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
702
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000703- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
704 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
705 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
706
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000707- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
708 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
709 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
710 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
711 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
712 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
713 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
714 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
715 releases or implementations.
716
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000717- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000718 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
719 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000720
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000721- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
722 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
723
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000724- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
725 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
726 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
727
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000728- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
729 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
730
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000731- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
732 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000733 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
734 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000735
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000736- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
737 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
738 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
739 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
740 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
741
742 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
743 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
744 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
745 pattern.
746
747 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
748 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
749 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
750 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
751
752 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
753 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
754 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
755 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
756 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
757 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
758
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000759- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
760 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
761 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
762 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
763 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
764 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
765 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
766 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000767
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000768- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
769 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
770 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
771 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
772 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000773 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
774 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
775 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
776 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
777 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
778 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
779 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000780
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000781- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
782 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
783
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000784- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
785 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
786 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
787 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
788 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
789 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
790 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
791 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
792 to Zack Weinberg!
793
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000794- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
795 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
796 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
797 type. This has been fixed now.
798
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000799- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
800 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
801 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
802
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000803- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
804 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
805 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
806 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
807 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
808 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
809 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
810 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000811 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000812
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000813- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
814 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
815 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000816
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000817- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
818 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
819 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
820 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
821 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
822 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
823 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
824 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000825 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000826 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
827 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
828
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000829- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
830 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
831 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
832 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
833 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
834 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
835 this.)
836
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000837- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
838 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000839 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000840 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000841 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
842 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000843 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
844 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000845
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000846- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
847 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
848 currently running.
849
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000850- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
851 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
852 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
853 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
854
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000855- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
856 as directory names.
857
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000858- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
859 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
860
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000861- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
862 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
863
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000864- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000865 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
866 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000867
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000868- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
869 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
870 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
871 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
872 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
873
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000874- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
875 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
876 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
877 removed.
878
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000879- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
880 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
881 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
882
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000883- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
884 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
885 to __debug__.
886
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000887- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
888 string to the left with zeros. For example,
889 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
890
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000891- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
892 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
893 deprecated now.
894
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000895- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
896 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
897 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000898
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000899- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
900 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
901 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
902 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
903 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000904
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000905- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
906 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
907
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000908- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
909 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
910 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000911 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000912 is backward compatible.
913
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000914- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
915 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
916 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
917 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
918 could access a pointer to freed memory.
919
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000920- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
921 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
922 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
923 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
924 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
925 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000926
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000927- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
928 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
929
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000930- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
931 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
932
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000933- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
934 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
935 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
936 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
937 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
938
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000939- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
940 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
941 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
942
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000943- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000944 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
945
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000946- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
947 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
948 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000949
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000950- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
951 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
952
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000953- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
954 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
955 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
956
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000957- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
958
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000959Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000960-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000961
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000962- Added three operators to the operator module:
963 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
964 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
965 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
966
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000967- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
968
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000969- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
970 archives.
971
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000972- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
973 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
974 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
975
976 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
977
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000978- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
979 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
980 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000981 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000982
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000983- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
984 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
985 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
986 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000987 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
988 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
989 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
990 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000991
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000992- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
993 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000994
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000995- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
996
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000997- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
998 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
999
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001000- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1001 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1002 supported.
1003
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001004- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1005
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001006- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1007 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001008
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001009- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1010 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1011
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001012- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1013
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001014- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1015 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1016
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001017- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1018 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1019 functions but callable type objects.
1020
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001021- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001022 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001023 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001024
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001025- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1026 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001027
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001028- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1029 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001030
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001031- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1032 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1033 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1034 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1035
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001036- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1037 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001038
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001039- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1040 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1041 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1042 and __imul__.
1043
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001044- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001045 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1046 is called.
1047
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001048- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1049 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1050 interpreter was compiled.
1051
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001052- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1053 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1054 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001055 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001056 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1057 1, not 2.
1058
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001059- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1060 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1061 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1062 limit.
1063
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001064- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1065 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1066 bug #623464.
1067
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001068- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1069 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1070 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1071 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1072
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001073Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001074-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001075
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001076- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1077
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001078- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1079 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1080 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1081 with Python 2.3a2.
1082
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001083- os.path exposes getctime.
1084
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001085- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001086 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001087 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001088 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001089 unit tests of floating point results.
1090
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001091- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1092 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1093 has been increased.
1094
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001095- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1096 executed.
1097
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001098- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1099 postinstallation script.
1100
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001101- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1102 test the current module.
1103
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001104- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001105 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1106 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1107 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1108 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1109
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001110- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001111 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001112 Ward's Optik package.
1113
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001114- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1115 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1116 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1117 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1118
1119- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1120 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001121 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001122
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001123- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1124 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1125 shelf are binary pickles.
1126
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001127- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1128 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1129
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001130- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1131 modules are iterators now.
1132
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001133- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1134 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1135 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1136 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1137 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1138 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001139
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001140- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1141 with their entity value.
1142
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001143- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1144
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001145- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1146 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001147
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001148- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1149 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001150 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001151
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001152- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1153 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1154 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1155 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1156 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1157 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1158 main():
1159
1160 import locale
1161 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1162
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001163- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1164 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1165
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001166- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1167 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1168 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1169 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1170 to the new standard.
1171
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001172- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1173 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1174 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1175 an extension to the database.
1176
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001177- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1178 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1179 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1180 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001181 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001182
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001183- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001184 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001185
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001186- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1187 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1188 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1189 bounded integers.
1190
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001191- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1192 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1193 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1194 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1195 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1196 in existence.
1197
1198 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1199 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1200 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1201 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1202 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1203 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1204
1205 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1206 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1207 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1208 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1209
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001210- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1211 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1212 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1213
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001214- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1215
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001216- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1217 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1218 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1219 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1220
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001221- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1222 argument.
1223
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001224- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1225 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1226 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1227 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1228 [SF patch 560794].
1229
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001230- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1231 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1232 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001233 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1234 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1235 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001236
1237- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1238 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001239
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001240- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1241 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1242 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1243 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001244
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001245- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1246 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1247 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1248 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1249 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1250
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001251- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001252
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001253- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1254
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001255- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1256 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1257 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1258 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1259 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1260 identical to None.
1261
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001262- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1263 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1264 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1265 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1266 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1267 results now.
1268
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001269- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1270 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1271
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001272- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1273 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1274 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1275 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1276 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1277 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1278 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1279 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1280
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001281- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1282
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001283- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1284 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1285
1286- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1287 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1288 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1289 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1290 and other systems.
1291
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001292- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1293 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1294 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1295 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 +00001296 work well with these.
1297
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001298- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1299
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001300- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001301 connections.
1302
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001303- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1304 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1305 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1306
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001307- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1308 sets
1309
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001310- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1311 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1312 name.
1313
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001314- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1315 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1316 passed in.
1317
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001318- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001319 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001320 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1321 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001322
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001323- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1324
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001325- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1326
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001327- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1328 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1329 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1330
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001331- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1332 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1333 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1334 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001335 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001336
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001337- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001338 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001339 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001340
1341- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1342 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1343 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1344
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001345- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001346 the value of its expression argument.
1347
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001348- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1349 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1350 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1351
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001352- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1353 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1354 skipstone browser was included.
1355
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001356- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1357 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1358
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001359Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001360-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001361
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001362- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1363 names in addition to accepting file names.
1364
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001365- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1366 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1367 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1368 still used and useful.)
1369
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001370- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1371 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1372 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1373 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001374
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001375- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1376 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1377 the generated binary.
1378
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001379Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001380-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001381
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001382- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1383
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001384- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1385 except in the hands of experts.
1386
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001387- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001388 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1389 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1390 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001391
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001392- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1393 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1394 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1395 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1396 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1397 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1398 builds.
1399
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001400- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1401 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1402 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1403 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1404 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1405 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1406 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1407 new type.
1408
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001409- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001410
1411 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1412 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1413 positive infinities.
1414
1415 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1416 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1417 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1418 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1419 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1420 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1421 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1422
1423 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1424
1425 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1426
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001427- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1428 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1429 size of the executable.
1430
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001431- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1432 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1433 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1434 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001435
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001436- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1437
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001438- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1439 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1440 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001441
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001442- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1443 well as Unix.
1444
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001445- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1446 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1447 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1448 modules in the README file for details.
1449
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001450C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001451-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001452
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001453- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1454 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001455 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001456 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001457 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001458
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001459- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1460 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1461 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1462 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1463 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1464 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001465 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001466 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1467 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1468 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1469 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1470 aligned.)
1471
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001472- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1473 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1474 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1475
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001476- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1477 level.
1478
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001479- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1480 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1481 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1482 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1483 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1484
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001485- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1486 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1487 code.
1488
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001489- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1490 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1491 adjusting for negative indices.
1492
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001493- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1494 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1495 object.
1496
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001497- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1498 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1499 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1500
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001501- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1502 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001503
1504- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1505
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001506- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1507 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1508 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1509 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1510
1511- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1512
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001513- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001514
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001515- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001516 without going through the buffer API.
1517
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001518- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001519
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001520- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1521 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1522 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1523 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1524
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001525- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1526 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1527
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001528- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001529 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001531New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001532-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001533
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001534- OpenVMS is now supported.
1535
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001536- AtheOS is now supported.
1537
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001538- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1539
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001540- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001542Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001543-----
1544
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001545- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1546 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1547 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001548
1549Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001550-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001551
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001552- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1553 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1554 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1555 bugs.
1556 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001557 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001558 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1559 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001560 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001561
1562- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001563 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001564
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001565- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1566 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1567
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001568- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1569 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001570 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001571 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1572
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001573- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1574 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1575 use files" uninstall option).
1576
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001577- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1578
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001579- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1580 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1581
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001582- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1583 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1584 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1585
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001586- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1587 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1588 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1589 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1590 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001591 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1592 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1593 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001594
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001595- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001596 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001597 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1598 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1599 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1600 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1601 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1602 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1603 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1604 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1605 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1606 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1607 work around.
1608
1609- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1610 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1611 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1612 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1613 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1614 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1615 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1616 specified with O_CREAT too).
1617
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001618Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001619----
1620
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001621- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001622
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001623- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1624 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1625 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1626
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001627- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1628 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1629 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1630
1631- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1632 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1633 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1634 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1635 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1636 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1637 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1638 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001639
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001640- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1641 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1642 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001643
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001644- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1645 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1646 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1647 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1648 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001649
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001650- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1651 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1652 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001653
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001654- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1655 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001656
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001657- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1658 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1659 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1660 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1661 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001662
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001663- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1664 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1665 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1666
1667- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1668 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1669 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001670
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001671- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1672 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1673 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1674 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001675 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001676
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001677- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1678 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001680- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1681 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001682
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001683- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001684 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001685 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1686 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001687
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001688
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001689What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001690===============================
1691
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001692*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1693
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001694Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001695--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001696
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001697- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1698 with a custom metaclass.
1699
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001700Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001701-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001702
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001703- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1704 are proxies.
1705
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001706Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001707-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001708
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001709- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1710 very short strings.
1711
1712- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1713 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1714 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1715 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1716 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1717
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001718Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001719-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001720
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001721- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1722 close or delete time).
1723
1724- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1725 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1726
1727- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1728
1729- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001730 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001731
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001732Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001733-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001734
1735Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001736-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001737
1738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001739-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001740
1741New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001742-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001743
1744Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001745-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001746
1747Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001748-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001749
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001750- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1751
1752- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1753 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1754
1755- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1756 deleted at process exit time.
1757
1758- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1759 in backslash.
1760
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001761Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001762----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001763
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001764- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1765 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1766 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1767
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001768
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001769What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001770===========================
1771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001772*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1773
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001774Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001775--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001776
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001777- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1778 been extensively updated. See
1779
1780 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1781
1782 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1783
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001784- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1785 deleted!
1786
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001787- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1788 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1789 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1790 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1791 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1792
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001793- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1794
1795 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1796 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1797
1798 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1799 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1800 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1801 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1802 supported anyway.
1803
1804 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1805 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1806
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001807- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1808 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1809 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1810 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1811 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001812
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001813- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1814 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1815 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001817Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001819
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001820- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1821 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1822 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1823 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1824 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1825 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001826 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1827 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1828 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1829 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001830
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001831- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1832 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1833 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1834
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001835Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001836-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001837
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001838- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1839
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001840Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001841-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001842
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001843- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1844 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1845 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1846 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1847 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1848 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1849
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001850- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1851
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001852- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1853
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001854- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1855
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001856- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1857 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1858 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1859
1860- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1861
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001862Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001863-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001864
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001865- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1866 off a search on Google.
1867
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001868Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001869-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001870
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001871- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1872 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1873 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1874 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1875 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1876 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1877 other platforms should do likewise.
1878
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001879- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1880 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1881 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1882
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001883C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001885
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001886- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1887 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1888 producing key-value pairs.
1889
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001890- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001891 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001892 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1893 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1894 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1895 previously went unchallenged.
1896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001897New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001898-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001899
1900Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001901-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001902
1903Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001904-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001905
1906Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001908
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001909- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1910 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001911
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001912- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1913 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1914 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1915 home.
1916
1917
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001918What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001919===========================
1920
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001921*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1922
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001923Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001924--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001925
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001926- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1927 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001928
1929 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001930 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001931
1932 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1933 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001934 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001935 This needs to be documented.
1936
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001937- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1938 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1939
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001940- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1941 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1942 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1943
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001944- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1945 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1946
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001947- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1948 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1949 class forbids it).
1950
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001951- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1952 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1953 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1954
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001955- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1956
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001957Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001958-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001959
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001960- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1961 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001962 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001963
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001964- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1965 (like 1 + '').
1966
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001967Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001969
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001970- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1971 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1972 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1973 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001974 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001975 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1976
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001977- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1978 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1979 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1980 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1981
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001982- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1983 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001984 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1985 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1986 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001987
1988- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1989 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001990
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001991- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1992 bytes on its input.
1993
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001994Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001995-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001996
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001997- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001998 convenience function.
1999
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002000- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2001 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2002 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002003 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2004 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2005 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2006 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2007 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2008 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002009
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002010- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2011 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2012 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2013 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2014
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002015- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2016 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2017 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2018
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002019- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2020 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2021 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2022 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2023
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002024- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2025 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002026 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002027 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2028 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2029 new -l and -e options.
2030
2031- statcache is now deprecated.
2032
2033- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2034 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002036 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2037 time properly taken into account.
2038
2039- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2040 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2041 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2042 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2043
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002044Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002045-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002046
2047Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002048-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002049
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002050- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2051 is built with libdb3 if available.
2052
2053- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2054
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002055C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002056-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002057
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002058- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2059 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2060 PySequence_Size().
2061
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002062- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2063
2064- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2065 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2066 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2067
2068- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2069 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2070
2071- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2072 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002074New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002075-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002076
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002077- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2078 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2079
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002080- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2081 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2082
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002083- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002085Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002086-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002087
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002088- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2089 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2090
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002091Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002092-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002093
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002094Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002095----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002096
2097- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2098 removed completely in the next release.
2099
2100- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2101 OSX.
2102
2103- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2104 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2105
2106- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2107
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002108
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002109What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002110===========================
2111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002112*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2113
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002114Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002115--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002116
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002117- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002118 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002119 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002120 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2121 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002122 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2123 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002124 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2125 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002126
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002127- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2128 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2129
2130- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2131 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2132
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002133Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002134-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002135
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002136- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2137 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2138 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2139 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2140 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2141 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2142 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2143 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2144
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002145- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2146 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2147 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2148 example).
2149
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002150- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002151 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002152 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002153 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002154
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002155- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2156 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2157 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002158 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002159
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002160- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2161 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2162 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2163 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2164 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2165 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2166
2167 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2168
2169 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2170
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002171Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002172-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002173
2174- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2175
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002176- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2177
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002178- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2179 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002180
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002181- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2182 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2183 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2184 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2185 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2186 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002187 attributes.
2188
2189- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2190 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2191 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002192
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002193- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2194 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2195 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002196
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002197- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2198 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2199 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002200 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2201 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2202
2203- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2204 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002205
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002207-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002208
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002209- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2210 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2211
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002212- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2213 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2214 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2215 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2216
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002217- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2218 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2219 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2220 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2221
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002222 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2223 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2224 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2225 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2226 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2227 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2228 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2229 without losing information).
2230
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002231- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002232 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2233 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2234 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2235 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2236 module).
2237
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002238 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002239 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2240 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2241 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2242 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002243
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002244- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002245 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2246 encoding.
2247
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002248- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2249 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002251- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002252 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2253
2254- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2255 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2256 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2257 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2258
2259- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2260
2261- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2262 ON, and OFF.
2263
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002264- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2265 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2266
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002267Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002268-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002269
2270- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2271 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2272 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002273
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002274- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2275 been added: -X and -E.
2276
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002277Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002278-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002279
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002280- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2281 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2282
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002283C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002284-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002285
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002286- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2287 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2288 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2289 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2290 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2291
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002292- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2293 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2294 as long) arguments.
2295
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002296- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2297 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2298 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2299 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2300 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2301 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2302
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002303- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2304 input.
2305
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002306New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002308
2309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002310-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002311
2312Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002313-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002314
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002315- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2316 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2317 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2318
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002319- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2320 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2321 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002322 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002324 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2325 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2326 import signal
2327 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002328
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002329 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002330 while 1:
2331 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002332 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002333 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2334 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2335 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2336 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002337
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002338
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002339What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2340===========================
2341
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002342*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2343
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002344Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002345--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002346
2347- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2348 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2349 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2350
2351- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2352 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2353 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2354 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2355 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2356 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2357 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002358
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002359- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002360 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002361 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2362 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2363 associate a docstring with a property.
2364
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002365- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2366 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2367 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2368 other built-in object types.
2369
2370- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2371 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2372 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2373 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2374 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2375
2376- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2377 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2378
2379- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2380 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002381 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002382 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2383 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2384 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2385 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2386 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2387
2388- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2389 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2390 class.
2391
2392- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2393 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2394 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2395 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2396
2397- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2398 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2399 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2400 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2401
2402- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2403 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2404
2405- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2406 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2407 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2408 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2409 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002410 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002411 with the same value as s.
2412
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002413- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2414
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002415Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002417
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002418- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2419
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002420- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2421 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2422 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2423 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2424 objects.
2425
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002426- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2427 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002428 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2429 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2430
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002431- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2432 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2433 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2434
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002435Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002436-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002437
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002438- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2439 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2440 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2441 by the instances.
2442
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002443- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2444 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2445 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2446
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002447- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2448 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2449 before the entire comparison is complete.
2450
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002451- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2452 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2453 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2454
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002455- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2456 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2457 getwriter().
2458
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002459- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2460 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2461
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002462- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002463 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2464 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2465
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002466- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2467 iterable object.
2468
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002469- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2470 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002471
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002472- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2473 authentication.
2474
2475- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2476 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002477
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002478- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002479 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2480 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2481 a sample driver.)
2482
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002483Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002486- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2487 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2488 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2489 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2490 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2491 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2492 kernel has large file support.
2493
2494- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2495 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2496 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2497 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2498 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2499
2500- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2501 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2502 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2503
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002504C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002505-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002506
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002507- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2508 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2509
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002510New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002511-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002512
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002513- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2514 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2515
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002516Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002517-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002518
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002519- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2520 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2521 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2522 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2523 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2524
2525- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2526 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2527 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2528 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2529
2530- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2531 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2532
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002533Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002534-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002535
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002536- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002537 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2538 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002539
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002540
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002541What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2542===========================
2543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002544*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2545
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002546Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002548
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002549- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2550 big to represent as a C double.
2551
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002552- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2553 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2554 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2555 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2556 restriction).
2557
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002558- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2559 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2560 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2561 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2562 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2563
2564 >>> dir([])
2565 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2566 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2567 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2568 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2569 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2570 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2571 'reverse', 'sort']
2572
2573 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2574
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002575- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002576 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2577 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2578 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2579 OverflowError exception.
2580
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002581- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002582 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002583 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2584 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2585 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2586 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2587 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002588 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002589 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2590 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2591
2592 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2593 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2594 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2595 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002596
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002597- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002598 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2599 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2600 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2601 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2602 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2603 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2604 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2605 once it is created.
2606
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002607- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2608 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2609 (key, value) pairs.
2610
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002611- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002612 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2613 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2614
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002615- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2616 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2617 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2618 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2619 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002620
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002621- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002622 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2623 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2624
2625 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2626
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002627- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002628 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2629
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002630Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002631-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002632
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002633- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002634 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2635 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002636
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002637- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2638 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2639 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2640 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2641 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2642 in this area anymore).
2643
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002644- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2645 threading.Timer.
2646
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002647- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2648 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2649
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002650- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002651 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2652
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002653- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002654 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2655 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2656 converted to Python longs.
2657
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002658- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002659 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2660
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002661- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2662 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2663 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2664
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002665Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002666-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002667
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002668- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2669 division operators as per PEP 238.
2670
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002671Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002673
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002674- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2675 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2676 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2677 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2678
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002679C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002681
2682- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002683
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002684- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2685 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002686 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002687
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002688 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2689 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002690 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002691 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002692
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002693- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002694 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2695 module:
2696
2697 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002698
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002699 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2700 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002701
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002702 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2703 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002704
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002705 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2706
2707 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002709- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002710 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2711 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2712 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002713
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002714New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002715-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002716
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002717- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2718 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2719 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2720 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2721 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002722
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002723Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002725
2726Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002728
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002729- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2730 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2731 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2732 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002733 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2734 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2735 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2736 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2737 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002738
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002739- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002740 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2741
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002742
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002743What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2744===========================
2745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2747
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002748Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002749-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002750
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002751- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2752 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2753
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002754- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2755 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2756 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002757
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002758- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2759 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2760 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2761 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002762
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002763- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002766
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002767Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002769
2770- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002771 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002772 the module docstring for details.
2773
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002774Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002775-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002776
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002777- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002778 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2779 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2780 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002781
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002782- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2783 Nick Mathewson.
2784
2785Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002787
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002788- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2789 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2790 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2791 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2792 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2793 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2794 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2795 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2796
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002797- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2798 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2799 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2800 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2801
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002802- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2803 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2804 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2805 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2806 come a long way).
2807
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002808- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2809 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2810 write filters for these warnings).
2811
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002812- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2813 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2814 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2815 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2816 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2817
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002818- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2819 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2820 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2821 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2822 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2823 older distribution.
2824
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002825Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002827
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002828- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2829 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002830 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002831
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002832- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2833 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2834 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2835
2836- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2837
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002838- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2839
2840- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2841
2842- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2843
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002844- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002845
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002846- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2847
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002850
2851C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002853
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002854- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2855 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2856 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2857 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2858 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2859 against buffer overruns.
2860
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002861- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002862 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2863 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002864 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2865 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2866 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2867
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002868- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2869 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2870 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2871 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2872 deprecated.
2873
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002874Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002875-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002876
2877- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2878 relevant is found.
2879
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002880
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002881What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002882===========================
2883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002884*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2885
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002886Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002888
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002889- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2890 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2891 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2892 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2893 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2894 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2895 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2896 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002897 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002898 repaired.
2899
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002900- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002901 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002902 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2903 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2904 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2905 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2906 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2907 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2908 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2909 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2910
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002911- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2912 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2913 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2914 leading BMO character).
2915
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002916- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2917 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2918 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2919
2920 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2921 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2922 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002923
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002924 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2925 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2926 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2927 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2928 for various simple to use conversions.
2929
2930 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2931 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2932
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2934 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2935 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2936 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2937 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2938 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2939 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2940 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2941 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2942 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2943 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2944 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2945 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2946 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2947 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002948
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002949- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2950 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2951 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002952 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002953 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002954
2955 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002956 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2957 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2958 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2959 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2960 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002961 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2962 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002963
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002964 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2965 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2966 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002967 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002968
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002969- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2970 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2971 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2972 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2973 floating arithmetic,
2974
2975 x = 9007199254740992.0
2976 print long(x)
2977
2978 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2979 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2980 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2981 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2982 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2983 functions are of good quality).
2984
2985 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2986 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2987 algorithms to break.
2988
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002989- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2990 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2991 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2992 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2993 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2994 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2995 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2996 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2997 order.
2998
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002999- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3000 operation along the most common code paths.
3001
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003002- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3003 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3004
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003005- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3006 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3007 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3008 {}.update(UserDict())
3009
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003010- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3011 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3012 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3013 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3014 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3015 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3016 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3017 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3018
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003019- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003020 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003021
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003022 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003023 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3024 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003025 join() method of strings
3026 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003027 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3028 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003030 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003031
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003032- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3033 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3034
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003035- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3036 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3037
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003038- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3039 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3040 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3041 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3042
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003043- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3044 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003045 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003046 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3047 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003048
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003049- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3050
3051
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003054
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003055- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003056 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003057 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3058 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3059
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003060- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3061 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3062
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003063- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3064 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3065 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3066 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3067
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003068- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3069 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3070 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3071
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003072- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3073
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003074- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3075
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003076- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3077 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3078 that are still imported into string.py).
3079
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003080- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3081
3082- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3083 Now it does.
3084
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003085- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3086
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003087- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3088 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3089 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3090 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3091 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003092 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3093 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003094
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003095- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3096 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3097 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3098 'help(object)'.
3099
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003100Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003101-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003102
3103- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003104 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003105 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3106 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3107
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003108- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003109 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3110 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003111
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003112C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003114
3115- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3116 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117
3118----
3119
3120**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**