blob: 708404d2b912586a3528dd71066ff0e25e50be8f [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000013- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
14
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000015- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
16 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
17
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000018- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000019 an ferror() call.
20
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000021- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
22 list.sort().
23
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000024- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
25 (2+3) --> (5).
26
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000027- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
28
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000029- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
30 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000031
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000032- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
33 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
34 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
35
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000036Extension Modules
37-----------------
38
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000039- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
40 file size.
41
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000042- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
43
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000044- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
45 {remove_history,replace_history}
46
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000047- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
48 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000049
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000050- stat_float_times is now True.
51
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000052- array.array objects are now picklable.
53
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000054- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
55 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
56
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000057- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
58 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
59 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
60
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000061- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
62 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000063
64Library
65-------
66
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000067- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
68
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000069- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
70 in LWPCookieJar.
71
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000072- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
73
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000074- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
75
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000076- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
77
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000078- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
79
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000080- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
81
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000082- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
83
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000084- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
85
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000086- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
87
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000088- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
89 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
90 be exploited in various ways.
91
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000092- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
93
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000094- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
95
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000096- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
97
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000098- Enhancements to the csv module:
99
100 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
101 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
102 PEP 305.
103 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
104 reporting.
105 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
106 dictates.
107 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000108 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000109 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000110 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
111 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000112 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
113 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000114 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000115 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
116 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
117 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
118 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
119 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
120 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
121 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
122 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
123 without first creating a dialect class.
124 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
125 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
126 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000127 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000128 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
129 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000130 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
131 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
132 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
133 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000134 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
135 This has been fixed.
136
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000137- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
138 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
139 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
140 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
141
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000142- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
143
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000144- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
145 (Bug #951915).
146
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000147- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
148 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
149 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
150 encoding alias table
151
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000152- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
153
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000154- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
155 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
156
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000157- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
158
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000159- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
160
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000161- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
162
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000163- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
164
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000165- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
166
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000167- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
168 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
169 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
170
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000171- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000172 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000173
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000174- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
175 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
176 tokenizer with very long source lines.
177
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000178- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
179 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
180
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000181- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
182 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000183
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000184- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
185 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
186
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000187Build
188-----
189
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000190- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
191 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
192
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000193- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
194 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
195 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
196 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
197 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
198 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
199 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
200 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
201
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000202- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
203 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
204 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
205 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
206
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
208C API
209-----
210
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000211- Removed PyRange_New().
212
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000213
214Tests
215-----
216
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000217- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000219
220Documentation
221-------------
222
223- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
224 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
225 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
226
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000227Mac
228---
229
230
231
232Tools/Demos
233-----------
234
235
236
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000237What's New in Python 2.4 final?
238===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000239
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000240*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000241
242Core and builtins
243-----------------
244
245- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
246 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
247 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
248
249
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000250What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
251==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000252
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000253*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000254
255Core and builtins
256-----------------
257
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000258- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
259 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
260 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
261
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000262
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000263Library
264-------
265
266- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
267 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
268 raised is re-raised.
269
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000270- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
271 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
272
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000273- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
274 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
275 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
276 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
277 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
278 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
279 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
280 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
281 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
282 by the slice are recomputed now.
283
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000284- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000285
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000286Build
287-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000288
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000289- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
290 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
291 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000292
293C API
294-----
295
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000296- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
297
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000298
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000299What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
300================================
301
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000302*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000303
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000304License
305-------
306
307The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
308is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
309changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
310Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
311intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
312durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
313the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
314License::
315
316 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
317
318says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
319to Python 2.1.1.
320
321The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
322License Version 2.
323
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000324Core and builtins
325-----------------
326
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000327- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
328 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
329 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
330 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
331 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
332 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
333 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
334 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
335 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
336 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
337
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000338- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000339
340Extension Modules
341-----------------
342
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000343- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
344 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
345 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
346 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000347
348Library
349-------
350
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000351- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
352 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
353 returned.
354
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000355- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
356
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000357- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
358 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
359
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000360- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
361
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000362- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
363 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000364
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000365- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
366
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000367- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
368
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000369- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000370 the source code is updated and reloaded.
371
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000372Build
373-----
374
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000375- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000376
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000377What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
378================================
379
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000380*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000381
382Core and builtins
383-----------------
384
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000385- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000386 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
387
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000388- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
389 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
390 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
391 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
392
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000393- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
394 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
395
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000396- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
397 constant.
398
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000399- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
400 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
401 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
402 large), and to anomalies such as
403 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
404 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
405 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
406 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000407
408Extension modules
409-----------------
410
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000411- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
412 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000413 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
414 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
415 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000416
417Library
418-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000419
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000420- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000421 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000422 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
423 --swig-cpp.
424
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000425- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
426 it is set.
427
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000428- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000429
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000430- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
431 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
432 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
433 Closes bug #1039270.
434
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000435- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000436
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000437 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000438 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
439 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
440 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
441 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
442 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
443 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
444 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
445 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
446 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
447 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
448 + Updates to documentation.
449
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000450- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
451 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
452 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
453 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
454
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000455- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000456
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000457- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
458 applications should use the getmember function.
459
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000460- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
461
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000462- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
463 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
464 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
465 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
466 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
467 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
468 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
469 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
470 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
471
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000472- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
473 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000474 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000475
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000476- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
477 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
478 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
479 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
480 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
481 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
482 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
483 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000484
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000485- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
486 the new public features (of which there are many).
487
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000488- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000489 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
490 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
491 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
492 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000493 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000494
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000495- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
496
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000497- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
498 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
499 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
500 options.
501
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000502- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
503 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
504 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
505 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
506 conditions under which non-string values work.
507
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000508Build
509-----
510
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000511- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
512 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
513 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
514
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000515- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
516 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
517 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
518 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
519 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000520
521C API
522-----
523
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000524- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
525 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
526
527- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
528
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000529- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
530 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
531 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
532 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
533 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
534 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
535 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
536 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
537 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
538
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000539- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
540
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000541- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
542 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
543 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000544
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000545Tests
546-----
547
548- test__locale ported to unittest
549
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000550Mac
551---
552
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000553- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
554 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
555 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000556
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000557Tools/Demos
558-----------
559
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000560- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
561 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
562 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
563 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
564 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000565
566
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000567What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
568=================================
569
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000570*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000571
572Core and builtins
573-----------------
574
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000575- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000576 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
577
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000578- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
579 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
580 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
581 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
582 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
583 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
584 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
585 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000586 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
587 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
588 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
589 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
590 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000591
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000592- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
593 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
594 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
595 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
596 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
597
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000598- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
599
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000600- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
601 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
602
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000603- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
604 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
605 modified the list.
606
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000607- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
608 functions is now writable.
609
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000610- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
611 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
612 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
613 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
614
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000615- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
616 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
617 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
618 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
619 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000620
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000621- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
622 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
623
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000624Extension modules
625-----------------
626
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000627- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
628
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000629- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
630 data.
631
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000632- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
633 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
634 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
635 supposed to have been truncated away.
636
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000637- Added socket.socketpair().
638
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000639- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
640 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
641
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000642- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000643 versions of Python, have now been removed.
644
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000645Library
646-------
647
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000648- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000649 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000650
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000651- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
652 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
653
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000654- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
655 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
656
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000657- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
658
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000659- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
660 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000661
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000662- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
663 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
664
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000665- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
666
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000667- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
668
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000669- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
670
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000671- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
672 Percivall.
673
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000674- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
675 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
676
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000677- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
678 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
679 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000680 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000681
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000682- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
683 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
684 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
685 and exponent.
686
687- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
688
689- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
690 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
691 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
692
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000693- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
694 to the readline module.
695
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000696- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000697 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
698 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000699
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000700- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
701 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
702 contains symlinks.
703
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000704- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
705 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
706
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000707- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
708 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
709 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
710
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000711- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
712 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
713 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
714 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
715 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
716 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
717 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
718 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
719 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
720 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
721 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
722 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
723 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
724
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000725- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
726
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000727Tools/Demos
728-----------
729
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000730- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
731 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
732
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000733- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
734
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000735Build
736-----
737
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000738- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
739 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
740 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
741 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
742 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
743 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
744 plans to do so.
745
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000746- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
747 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
748
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000749- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
750 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
751
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000752- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
753 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
754
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000755- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
756 GNU/k*BSD systems.
757
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000758- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
759 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
760
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000761C API
762-----
763
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000764..
765
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000766Documentation
767-------------
768
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000769- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
770 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
771
772- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
773 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
774 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000775
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000776New platforms
777-------------
778
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000779- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
780
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000781Tests
782-----
783
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000784..
785
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000786Windows
787-------
788
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000789- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
790 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
791 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
792 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
793 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
794 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
795 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
796 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
797 the problem.
798
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000799Mac
800---
801
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000802..
803
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000804
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000805What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
806=================================
807
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000808*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000809
810Core and builtins
811-----------------
812
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000813- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
814 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
815 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
816 sensitive code.
817
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000818- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000819 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000820
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000821 @staticmethod
822 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000823
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000824 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000825
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000826- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
827 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
828 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
829 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
830 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
831 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
832 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
833 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
834 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
835 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
836 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
837
838 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
839 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
840 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
841 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
842 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
843 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
844 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
845
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000846- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
847 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
848
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000849- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000850 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000851
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000852- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000853 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000854 which was missing for no apparent reason.
855
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000856- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000857 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
858 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
859
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000860- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
861 types that support garbage collection.
862
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000863- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
864
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000865- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
866 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
867 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
868 Jython.
869
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000870- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
871
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000872- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
873 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
874
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000875- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
876 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
877 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000878
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000879- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
880 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
881 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
882
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000883Extension modules
884-----------------
885
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000886- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
887
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000888Library
889-------
890
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000891- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
892 TIS-620
893
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000894- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
895 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
896 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
897 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
898 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
899 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
900 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
901 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
902 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
903 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
904
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000905- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
906
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000907- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
908 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
909 same as when the argument is omitted).
910 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
911
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000912- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
913
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000914- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
915 schemes are offered.
916
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000917- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
918
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000919- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
920 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
921 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
922
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000923- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
924
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000925- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
926 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
927
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000928- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
929 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
930 when dummy_threading is being used.
931
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000932- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
933 from a tarfile.
934
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000935- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000936 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000937
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000938- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
939 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
940 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
941 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
942
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000943- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
944 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
945
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000946- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
947 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
948 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
949 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
950 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
951 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
952 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
953 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
954 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
955 by some other method in progress).
956
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000957- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
958 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
959 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000960
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000961- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
962
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000963- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
964 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
965 AM Kuchling.
966
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000967- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
968 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
969 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
970
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000971- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
972 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
973 instead of unsigned.
974
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000975- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000976 no longer part of the public API.
977
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000978- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
979 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
980 string methods of the same name).
981
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000982- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000983 SF patch 945642.
984
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000985- doctest unittest integration improvements:
986
987 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
988
989 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
990 DocTestSuites.
991
992- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
993 that provide thread-local data.
994
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000995- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
996 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
997
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000998- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
999
1000- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1001 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1002 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1003
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001004- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1005
1006 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1007 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1008 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001009
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001010 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1011 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1012 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1013 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1014
1015 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1016 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1017
1018 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1019 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1020 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1021 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1022
1023 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1024 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1025 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1026 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1027 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1028
1029 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1030 wrapping help output.
1031
1032 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1033 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1034 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001035
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001036C API
1037-----
1038
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001039- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1040 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1041 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1042 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1043 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1044 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1045 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1046 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1047 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1048 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1049 its visible semantics have not changed.
1050
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001051- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1052 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1053
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001054Documentation
1055-------------
1056
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001057- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001058
1059 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001060 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001061
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001062 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001063
1064 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1065
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001066- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001067
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001068Tests
1069-----
1070
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001071- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001072 platforms that use the Makefile.
1073
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001074- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1075 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1076 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1077
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001078
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001079What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1080=================================
1081
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001082*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001083
1084Core and builtins
1085-----------------
1086
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001087- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1088 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1089 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1090 objects now (one object instead of three).
1091
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001092- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1093 Windows DLLs.
1094
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001095- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1096 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001097
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001098- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1099 a new .pyc magic.
1100
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001101- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1102 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1103 be there.
1104
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001105- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1106 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1107 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1108
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001109- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1110 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1111 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1112
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001113- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1114
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001115- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1116 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1117 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001118
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001119- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1120 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1121
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001122- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1123
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001124- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001125 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001126
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001127- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1128
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001129- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1130
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001131- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1132 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1133
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001134- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1135 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1136 Fixes bug #858016 .
1137
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001138- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1139 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1140 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1141
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001142- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1143 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1144 improves their performance (about 35%).
1145
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001146- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1147 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1148 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1149
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001150- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1151 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1152 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1153 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1154
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001155- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1156 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1157 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1158 length is not known).
1159
1160- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1161 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001162 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1163 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001164 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1165
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001166- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1167 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1168
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001169- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1170 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1171 keyword arguments.
1172
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001173- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1174 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1175 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1176
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001177- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1178 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1179 cases.
1180
1181- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1182 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1183 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1184 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1185 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1186 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1187 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1188 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1189 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1190 a release build.
1191
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001192- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1193 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1194
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001195- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001196 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001197
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001198- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1199 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1200 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1201 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1202 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1203 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1204 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1205 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1206 destroyed.
1207
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001208- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1209 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1210 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1211 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1212 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1213 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1214 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1215 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1216
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001217- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1218 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1219 character other than a space.
1220
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001221- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1222 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1223 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1224 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1225 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1226 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1227 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1228 attributes with the same name.
1229
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001230- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1231 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1232 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1233 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1234 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1235 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1236 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1237 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1238 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1239 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1240 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1241 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1242 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1243 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001244
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001245- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1246 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1247 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1248 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1249 This has been repaired.
1250
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001251- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1252
1253- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1254
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001255- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1256 over a sequence.
1257
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001258- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001259 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001260
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001261- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1262
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001263- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1264 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1265 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1266 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1267 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1268 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1269 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1270 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1271
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001272- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1273 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1274 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1275
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001276- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1277 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1278 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1279 freelist.
1280
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001281- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1282 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1283
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001284- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1285 number.
1286
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001287- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1288 a TypeError exception.
1289
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001290- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1291 820195.
1292
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001293- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1294 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1295 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1296
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001297- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001298 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1299 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001300
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001301- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1302 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1303 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1304
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001305- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1306 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001307 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001308
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001309- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001310 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1311 the first call.
1312
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001314Extension modules
1315-----------------
1316
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001317- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1318 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1319
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001320- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1321 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1322 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1323 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1324 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1325 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1326 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001327
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001328- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1329
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001330- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1331
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001332- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1333 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1334
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001335- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1336 fewer false positives.
1337
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001338- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1339 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1340
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001341- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001342 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1343
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001344- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001345 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001346 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001347 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1348 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001349
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001350- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1351 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1352 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1353 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1354
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001355- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1356 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1357 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1358 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1359 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1360 #897625.
1361
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001362- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1363 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1364
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001365- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1366 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1367 and pops on either side of the deque.
1368
1369- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1370 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1371
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001372- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1373 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1374 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1375 other functions that expect a function argument.
1376
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001377- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1378
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001379- os.getsid was added.
1380
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001381- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1382 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1383 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1384
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001385- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1386
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001387- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1388
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001389- readline.clear_history was added.
1390
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001391- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1392
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001393- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1394
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001395- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1396
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001397- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1398
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001399- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1400
1401- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1402
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001403- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1404
1405- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1406
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001407- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1408 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1409 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1410
1411- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1412 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1413 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1414 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1415 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1416 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1417 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1418
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001419- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1420 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1421 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1422 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001423
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001424- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001425 iterators from a single iterable.
1426
1427- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1428 of raising a TypeError exception.
1429
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001430- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1431 as parameter.
1432
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001433Library
1434-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001435
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001436- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1437 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1438 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001439
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001440- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1441 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1442 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001443
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001444- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001445
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001446- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1447 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001448
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001449- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1450 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1451
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001452- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1453
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001454- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001455 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001456
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001457- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001458 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001459
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001460- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1461
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001462- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1463 on cygwin and mingw32.
1464
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001465- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1466
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001467- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1468 module.
1469
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001470- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1471 installation scheme for all platforms.
1472
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001473- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001474 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001475
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001476- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1477 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1478 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1479
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001480- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1481 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1482 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1483
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001484- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1485
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001486- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1487
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001488- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1489 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1490
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001491- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1492 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1493 type pattern with the same value exists.
1494
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001495- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1496 when run from the command prompt).
1497
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001498- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1499 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1500
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001501- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1502 default sort).
1503
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001504- Added global runctx function to profile module
1505
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001506- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1507
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001508- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1509
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001510- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1511
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001512- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001513 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1514 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1515 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1516 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1517 accordingly.
1518
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001519- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1520 decoding standards.
1521
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001522- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1523 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1524 called for all requests.
1525
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001526- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1527 they are passed to the compiler.
1528
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001529- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1530 indent, width and depth.
1531
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001532- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1533 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1534
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001535- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1536 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1537
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001538- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1539
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001540- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1541
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001542- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1543
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001544- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1545 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1546
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001547- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001548 for better performance.
1549
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001550- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001551
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001552- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1553 a string).
1554
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001555- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1556
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001557- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1558
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001559- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1560
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001561- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1562
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001563- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1564 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1565 list of fieldnames.
1566
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001567- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1568 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1569
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001570- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1571
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001572- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1573 empty lists.
1574
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001575- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1576 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1577 and shelves.
1578
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001579- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1580 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1581
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001582- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001583 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1584 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001585
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001586- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1587 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001588 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001589
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001590- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001591 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1592 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1593
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001594- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1595 and removed in Py2.4.
1596
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001597- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1598
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001599- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1600
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001601Tools/Demos
1602-----------
1603
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001604- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1605 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1606
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001607- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1608
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001609- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1610 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1611 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1612 destination in situations where both files are given.
1613
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001614- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1615 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1616 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1617 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1618
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001619- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1620
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001621- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1622 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1623 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1624 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1625 now.
1626
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001627- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1628 in effect
1629
1630- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1631 C-c C-h
1632
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001633- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1634 -d option was given.
1635
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001636Build
1637-----
1638
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001639- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1640 build under OS X.
1641
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001642- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1643 --enable-profiling.
1644
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001645- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1646 is configured --with-tsc.
1647
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001648- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1649 on AMD64.
1650
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001651- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1652 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1653
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001654- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1655 removed.
1656
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001657- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1658 supported (see PEP 11).
1659
1660- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1661
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001662- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1663
1664- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1665 (see PEP 11).
1666
1667- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1668 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1669
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001670C API
1671-----
1672
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001673- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1674 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1675 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1676
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001677- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1678 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1679 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1680 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1681
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001682- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1683 generator objects.
1684
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001685- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1686 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001687 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1688 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001689
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001690- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1691 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1692
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001693- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1694 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1695 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1696 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1697 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1698
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001699- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1700 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1701 about 10% faster.
1702
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001703- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1704 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1705
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001706- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1707 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1708 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1709 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1710
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001711Windows
1712-------
1713
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001714- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1715 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1716 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1717 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1718
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001719- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1720 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1721 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1722
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001723
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001724What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1725===============================
1726
1727*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1728
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001729IDLE
1730----
1731
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001732- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1733 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1734 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1735 context-menu actions.
1736
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001737- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1738 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1739 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1740 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1741 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1742 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1743 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1744 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1745 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1746
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001747
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001748What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1749=============================================
1750
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001751*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001752
1753Core and builtins
1754-----------------
1755
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001756- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001757 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001758 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1759
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001760Extension modules
1761-----------------
1762
1763- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1764 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1765 than once. This has been fixed.
1766
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001767- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1768 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1769 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1770 call.
1771
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001772- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1773
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001774Library
1775-------
1776
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001777- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1778 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1779
1780- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1781 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1782 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1783 restored.
1784
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001785IDLE
1786----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001787
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001788- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001789
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001790Build
1791-----
1792
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001793- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1794 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1795
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001796C API
1797-----
1798
1799Windows
1800-------
1801
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001802- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1803 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1804
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001805- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1806
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001807Mac
1808---
1809
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001810- Various fixes to pimp.
1811
1812- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1813
1814- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1815 more problems than it solves.
1816
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001817
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001818What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1819=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001820
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001821*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1822
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001823Core and builtins
1824-----------------
1825
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001826- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1827 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1828
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001829- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1830 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001831 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001832
1833- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1834 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1835 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001836 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001837
1838- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1839 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001840
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1842 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1843 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1844
1845- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001846 770247.
1847
1848- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001849
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001850Extension modules
1851-----------------
1852
1853- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1854 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1855
1856- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1857
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001858- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1859
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001860- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1861 contained within the _strptime module.
1862
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001863- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1864 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1865
1866- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001867 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1868
1869- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1870 the find_class attribute, if present.
1871
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001872- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001873
1874 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1875 (SF bug 763298).
1876
1877 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001878 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1879 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1880 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001881
1882 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1883
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001884Library
1885-------
1886
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001887- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1888
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001889- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1890 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1891 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1892 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1893 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1894 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1895 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1896 or Tester().
1897
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001898- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1899 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1900 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1901 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1902 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1903 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1904 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1905 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1906 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001907
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001908 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001909
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001910- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1911 weren't before was an oversight.
1912
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001913- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1914 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1915
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001916- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1917 when there are no lines.
1918
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001919- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1920 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1921
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001922- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1923 to child processes.
1924
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001925- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1926
1927- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1928
1929- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1930 xmlrpclib.
1931
1932- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1933 responses.
1934
1935- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1936 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1937
1938- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1939 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1940 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1941
1942- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1943 used as patterns.
1944
1945- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1946 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1947 than Tk 8.3.
1948
1949- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1950
1951- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001952
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001953Tools/Demos
1954-----------
1955
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001956- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1957
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001958- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1959
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001960- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001961
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001962Build
1963-----
1964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001965- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1966
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001967- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1968
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001969- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1970 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001971
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001972- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1973 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1974 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001975
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001976C API
1977-----
1978
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001979- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1980 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1981
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001982Windows
1983-------
1984
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001985- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1986 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1987 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1988 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1989 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1990 Python exception ::
1991
1992 thread.error: can't start new thread
1993
1994 is raised now.
1995
1996- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1997 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1998 instead of from DLL teardown.
1999
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002000Mac
2001---
2002
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002003- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002004 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002005 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2006 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2007 the executable in the bundle.
2008
2009- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002010
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002011- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2012
2013- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2014 on Panther.
2015
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002016What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2017================================
2018
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002019*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002020
2021Core and builtins
2022-----------------
2023
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002024- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2025 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2026 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2027 with the -i option.
2028
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002029- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2030 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2031
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002032- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2033 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2034
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002035- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2036 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2037 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2038 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2039 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2040 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2041 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2042 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2043 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2044 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2045 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2046 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2047 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002048
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002049- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2050 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2051 embedded in a lambda expression.
2052
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002053- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2054 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2055 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2056 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2057 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2058
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002059- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2060 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2061 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2062
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002063- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2064 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2065
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002066- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2067 It's writable again.
2068
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002069- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2070 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2071 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002072 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002073
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002074- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2075 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2076 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2077
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002078Extension modules
2079-----------------
2080
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002081- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2082 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2083
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002084- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2085 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2086 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2087 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2088
2089- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2090 collection.
2091
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002092- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2093 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2094 unique within a single program run.
2095
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002096- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2097 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2098
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002099- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2100 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2101
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002102- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2103 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002104
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002105- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2106
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002107- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2108 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2109
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002110- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2111 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2112 for many BSD-derived systems.
2113
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002114
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002115Library
2116-------
2117
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002118- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2119 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2120 primary ones:
2121
2122 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2123 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2124 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2125
2126 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2127 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2128 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2129 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2130 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2131 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2132
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002133- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2134 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2135 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2136 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2137 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2138 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2139 argument.
2140
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002141- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2142 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2143 in the archive.
2144
2145- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2146 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2147
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002148- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2149 569574).
2150
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002151- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2152 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2153 no more.
2154
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002155- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2156 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2157 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2158 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2159 code coverage.
2160
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002161- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2162 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2163 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002164 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2165 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002166
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002167- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2168 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2169 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002170 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002171
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002172- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2173
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002174- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2175 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2176 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2177 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2178
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002179- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2180 handling.
2181
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002182- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2183 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2184
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002185- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2186 in socket.py.
2187
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002188- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2189
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002190- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2191 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2192 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2193 opener with proxy support.
2194
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002195- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2196
2197- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2198
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002199Tools/Demos
2200-----------
2201
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002202- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2203
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002204- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2205
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002206- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2207 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002208
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002209- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2210 files.
2211
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002212Build
2213-----
2214
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002215- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002216 different root directory.
2217
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002218C API
2219-----
2220
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002221- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2222 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2223 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2224 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2225 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2226 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2227 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2228 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2229 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2230 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2231
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002232- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2233 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2234 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2235 from Python.
2236
2237
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002238New platforms
2239-------------
2240
2241None this time.
2242
2243Tests
2244-----
2245
2246- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2247 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2248
2249Windows
2250-------
2251
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002252- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2253
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002254- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2255 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2256 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2257 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2258 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2259 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2260 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2261 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2262 that's what it's for.
2263
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002264Mac
2265---
2266
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002267- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2268 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2269 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2270 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002271- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2272 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2273- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002274
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002275SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2276------------------------------------
2277
2278430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2279598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2280622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2281661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2282683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2283697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2284713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2285724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2286727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2287729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2288730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2289731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2290732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2291733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2292735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2293740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2294744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2295745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2296747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2297749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2298751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2299753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2300755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2301757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2302760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2303
2304
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002305What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2306================================
2307
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002308*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002309
2310Core and builtins
2311-----------------
2312
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002313- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2314 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2315
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002316- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2317 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2318 and cannot be strings).
2319
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002320- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2321 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2322 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2323 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2324
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002325- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2326 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2327 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2328 Python itself.
2329
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002330- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2331 the referenced object, if it has one.
2332
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002333- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2334 the thread started at
2335 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2336
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002337- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2338 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2339 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2340 placed on a list index.
2341
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002342- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2343 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2344 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2345 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2346
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002347- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2348 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2349 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2350 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2351 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2352 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2353 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2354
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002355- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2356 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2357 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2358 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2359 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2360
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002361- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2362 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002363
2364- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2365 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2366 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2367 #693195.)
2368
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002369- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2370 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002371
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002372- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002373 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002374 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2375 interpreter executions, would fail.
2376
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002377- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002378 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002379 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002380
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002381Extension modules
2382-----------------
2383
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002384- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2385 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2386 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2387 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2388
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002389- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2390 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2391
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002392- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2393 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2394 and Greg Chapman.)
2395
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002396- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2397 recursively.
2398
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002399- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002400 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2401 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2402 leaks.
2403
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002404- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2405
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002406- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2407 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2408 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2409 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2410 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2411 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2412 #705836.
2413
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002414- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002415 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2416
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002417- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2418 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2419 See SF bug #692416.
2420
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002421- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2422 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2423
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002424- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2425 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2426 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002427
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002428- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002429 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2430 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2431
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002432- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2433 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2434 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2435 timeouts to work properly.
2436
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002437Library
2438-------
2439
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002440- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2441 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2442 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2443 future release.
2444
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002445- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2446 for querying platform dependent features.
2447
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002448- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002449
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002450- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2451 pickle protocol versions.
2452
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002453- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2454 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2455 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2456
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002457- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2458
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002459- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2460 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2461 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2462 modules.
2463
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002464- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2465 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2466 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2467
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002468- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2469 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2470
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002471- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2472 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2473 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2474
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002475- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002476 MS Office extensions.
2477
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002478- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2479 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2480
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002481- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2482 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2483
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002484- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2485 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2486 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2487 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2488 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2489 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2490
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002491- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2492 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2493 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002494
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002495- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2496 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2497 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2498
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002499- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2500
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002501- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2502 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2503 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2504
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002505Tools/Demos
2506-----------
2507
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002508- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2509 See the module docstring for details.
2510
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002511Build
2512-----
2513
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002514- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2515 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002516
2517C API
2518-----
2519
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002520- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2521
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002522- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2523 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2524 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2525
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002526- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2527 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002528
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002529 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2530 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2531 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002532
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002533- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002534 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2535
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002536- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2537 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2538 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002539
2540New platforms
2541-------------
2542
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002543None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002544
2545Tests
2546-----
2547
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002548- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2549 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002550
2551Windows
2552-------
2553
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002554- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2555 function.
2556
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002557- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2558 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002559
2560Mac
2561---
2562
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002563- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2564 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002565
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002566- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2567 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002568
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002569- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2570 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2571 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002572
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002573- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002574 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2575 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002576
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002577- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2578 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002579
2580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002581What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2582=================================
2583
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002584*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002585
2586Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002587-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002588
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002589- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2590 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2591 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2592
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002593- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2594 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2595 (SF patch #664376.)
2596
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002597- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2598 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2599 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2600 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2601 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2602 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002603 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002604
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002605- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2606 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2607 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2608 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002609 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002610
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002611- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2612 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2613 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2614 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2615 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2616 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2617 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2618 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2619 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2620 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2621 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2622
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002623- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2624 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2625 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2626 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2627 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2628 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2629
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002630- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2631 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2632
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002633- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2634 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2635 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2636 case.)
2637
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002638- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2639 passed as unicode strings.
2640
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002641- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2642 See SF bug #683467.
2643
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002644- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2645 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2646
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002647- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2648
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002649- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2650
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002651- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2652 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2653 arguments.
2654
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002655- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2656 See SF bug #667147.
2657
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002658- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002659 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002660 See SF bug #676155.
2661
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002662- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002663 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002664 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2665 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2666 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2667 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2668 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2669 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002671Extension modules
2672-----------------
2673
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002674- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2675 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2676 tp_as_number pointer.
2677
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002678- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2679 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2680 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2681 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2682 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2683
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002684- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2685
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002686- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2687
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002688- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002689 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002690 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2691 patch #678531.)
2692
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002693- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2694 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2695
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002696- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2697 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2698
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002699- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2700
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002701- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2702 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2703 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2704
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002705- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2706
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002707- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2708 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2709
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002710- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002711
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002712- datetime changes:
2713
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002714 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2715
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002716 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2717 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2718 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2719 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2720 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2721 now.
2722
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002723 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002724 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2725 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002726
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002727 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002728 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002729 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2730 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2731 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2732 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002733
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002734 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2735 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2736 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002737 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2738
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002739 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2740 by a later example coded by Guido.
2741
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002742 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002743 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2744 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2745 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002746 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2747 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2748
2749 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2750 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2751 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2752 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2753 tzinfo subclass instance.
2754
2755 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2756 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2757 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2758 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2759 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2760 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2761 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2762 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002763
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002764 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2765 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2766 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2767 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2768 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002769 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2770
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002771 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002772
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002773 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2774 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2775 as a naive datetime object.
2776
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002777 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2778 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2779 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2780
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002781 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2782 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2783 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2784 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2785 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2786 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2787 comparison.
2788
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002789 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2790 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2791 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2792 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002793 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002794
2795 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002796
2797 and ::
2798
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002799 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2800
2801 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2802 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2803 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2804 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2805
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002806 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2807 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2808 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2809 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2810 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2811
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002812 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2813 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002814 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2815 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002816
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002817Library
2818-------
2819
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002820- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2821 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2822
2823- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2824 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2825 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2826 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2827 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2828 See PEP 307 for details.
2829
2830- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2831 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2832
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002833- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2834 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002835 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002836 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2837 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002838 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002839
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002840- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2841 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2842
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002843- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2844 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2845 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2846
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002847- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2848
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002849- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2850 exception.
2851
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002852- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2853 class.
2854
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002855- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2856 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2857 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2858
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002859- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2860 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2861
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002862- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002863 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2864 See SF bug #659228.
2865
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002866- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2867 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2868 See SF patch #651082.
2869
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002870- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002871
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002872- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2873 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2874
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002875- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002876 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002877
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002878- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2879 DOS paths from other platforms.
2880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002881Tools/Demos
2882-----------
2883
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002884- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2885 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2886 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2887 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2888 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2889 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2890 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2891 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2892 example:
2893
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002894 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2895 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002896
2897 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2898
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002900Build
2901-----
2902
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002903- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2904 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2905 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002906 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2907
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002908 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2909
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002910- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2911 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2912 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2913 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2914 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2915 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2916 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2917 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2918 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2919
2920- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2921 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2922 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2923 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2924
2925- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2926 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2927
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002928C API
2929-----
2930
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002931- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2932 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002933
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002934- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2935 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2936 tp_as_number pointer.
2937
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002938- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2939 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2940 (SF #681367)
2941
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002942- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2943 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2944 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2945 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002947Tests
2948-----
2949
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002950- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002951 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2952 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2953 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2954 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2955 pydoc.)
2956
2957- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2958
2959- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002960
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002961Windows
2962-------
2963
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002964- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2965 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2966 time).
2967
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002968- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2969 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2970
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002971- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2972 release without strong cryptography.
2973
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002974- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002975 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002976
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002977- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2978 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2979
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002980Mac
2981---
2982
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002983- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2984 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002985
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002986- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2987 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2988 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002989
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002990- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2991 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002992
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002993- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2994 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2995 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2996 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002997
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002998- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002999 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3000 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3001 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003002
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003005=================================
3006
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003007*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003011
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003012- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3013
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003014- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3015 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003016 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003017 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003018 a different meaning than before.
3019
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003020- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003021 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003022 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003023
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003024- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003025 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003026 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003027
3028- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3029 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3030 and deallocation.
3031
3032- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3033 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3034
3035- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3036 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3037 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3038 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3039 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3040
3041- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3042 now detected by the garbage collector.
3043
3044- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3045 [SF bug 519621]
3046
3047- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3048 identifier.
3049
3050- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3051 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3052 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3053 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3054 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3055 [SF bug 563060]
3056
3057- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3058 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3059 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3060 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3061 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3062
3063- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3064 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3065 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3066
3067- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3068
3069- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3070 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3071 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3072 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3073 state of the slots would be lost.)
3074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003075Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003077
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003078- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003079 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3080 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3081 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3082 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003083 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3084 Jython 2.1.
3085
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003086- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003087 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003088 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3089 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3090 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3091 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3092 these, see PEP 302.
3093
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003094- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3095 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3096 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3097
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003098- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3099 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3100 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3101
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003102- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3103 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3104 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3105
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003106- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3107 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3108 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3109 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3110 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3111 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3112 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3113 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3114 releases or implementations.
3115
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003116- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003117 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3118 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003119
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003120- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3121 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3122
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003123- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3124 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3125 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3126
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003127- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3128 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3129
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003130- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3131 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003132 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3133 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003134
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003135- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3136 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3137 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3138 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3139 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3140
3141 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3142 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3143 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3144 pattern.
3145
3146 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3147 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3148 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3149 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3150
3151 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3152 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3153 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3154 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3155 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3156 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3157
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003158- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3159 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3160 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3161 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3162 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3163 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3164 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3165 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003166
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003167- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3168 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3169 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3170 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3171 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003172 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3173 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3174 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3175 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3176 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3177 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3178 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003179
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003180- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3181 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3182
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003183- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3184 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3185 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3186 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3187 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3188 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3189 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3190 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3191 to Zack Weinberg!
3192
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003193- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3194 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3195 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3196 type. This has been fixed now.
3197
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003198- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3199 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3200 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3201
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003202- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3203 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3204 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3205 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3206 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3207 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3208 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3209 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003210 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003211
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003212- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3213 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3214 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003215
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003216- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3217 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3218 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3219 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3220 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3221 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3222 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3223 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003224 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003225 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3226 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3227
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003228- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3229 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3230 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3231 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3232 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3233 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3234 this.)
3235
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003236- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3237 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003238 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003239 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003240 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3241 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003242 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3243 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003244
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003245- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3246 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3247 currently running.
3248
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003249- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3250 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3251 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3252 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3253
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003254- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3255 as directory names.
3256
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003257- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3258 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3259
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003260- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3261 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3262
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003263- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003264 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3265 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003266
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003267- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3268 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3269 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3270 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3271 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3272
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003273- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3274 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3275 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3276 removed.
3277
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003278- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3279 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3280 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3281
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003282- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3283 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3284 to __debug__.
3285
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003286- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3287 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3288 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3289
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003290- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3291 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3292 deprecated now.
3293
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003294- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3295 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3296 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003297
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003298- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3299 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3300 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3301 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3302 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003303
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003304- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3305 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3306
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003307- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3308 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3309 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003310 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003311 is backward compatible.
3312
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003313- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3314 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3315 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3316 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3317 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3318
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003319- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3320 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3321 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3322 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3323 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3324 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003325
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003326- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3327 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3328
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003329- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3330 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3331
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003332- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3333 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3334 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3335 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3336 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3337
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003338- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3339 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3340 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3341
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003342- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003343 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3344
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003345- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3346 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3347 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003348
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003349- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3350 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3351
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003352- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3353 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3354 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3355
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003356- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003360
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003361- Added three operators to the operator module:
3362 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3363 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3364 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3365
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003366- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3367
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003368- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3369 archives.
3370
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003371- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3372 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3373 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3374
3375 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3376
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003377- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3378 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3379 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003380 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003381
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003382- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3383 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3384 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3385 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003386 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3387 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3388 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3389 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003390
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003391- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3392 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003393
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003394- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3395
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003396- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3397 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3398
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003399- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3400 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3401 supported.
3402
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003403- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3404
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003405- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3406 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003407
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003408- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3409 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3410
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003411- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3412
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003413- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3414 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3415
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003416- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3417 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3418 functions but callable type objects.
3419
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003420- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003421 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003422 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003423
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003424- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3425 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003426
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003427- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3428 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003429
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003430- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3431 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3432 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3433 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3434
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003435- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3436 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003437
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003438- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3439 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3440 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3441 and __imul__.
3442
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003443- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003444 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3445 is called.
3446
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003447- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3448 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3449 interpreter was compiled.
3450
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003451- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3452 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3453 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003454 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003455 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3456 1, not 2.
3457
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003458- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3459 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3460 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3461 limit.
3462
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003463- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3464 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3465 bug #623464.
3466
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003467- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3468 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3469 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3470 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3471
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003472Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003474
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003475- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3476
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003477- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3478 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3479 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3480 with Python 2.3a2.
3481
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003482- os.path exposes getctime.
3483
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003484- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003485 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003486 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003487 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003488 unit tests of floating point results.
3489
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003490- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3491 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3492 has been increased.
3493
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003494- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3495 executed.
3496
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003497- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3498 postinstallation script.
3499
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003500- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3501 test the current module.
3502
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003503- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003504 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3505 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3506 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3507 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3508
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003509- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003510 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003511 Ward's Optik package.
3512
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003513- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3514 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3515 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3516 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3517
3518- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3519 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003520 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003521
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003522- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3523 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3524 shelf are binary pickles.
3525
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003526- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3527 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3528
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003529- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3530 modules are iterators now.
3531
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003532- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3533 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3534 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3535 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3536 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3537 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003538
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003539- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3540 with their entity value.
3541
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003542- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3543
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003544- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3545 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003546
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003547- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3548 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003549 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003550
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003551- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3552 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3553 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3554 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3555 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3556 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3557 main():
3558
3559 import locale
3560 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3561
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003562- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3563 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3564
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003565- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3566 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3567 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3568 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3569 to the new standard.
3570
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003571- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3572 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3573 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3574 an extension to the database.
3575
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003576- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3577 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3578 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3579 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003580 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003581
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003582- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003583 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003584
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003585- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3586 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3587 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3588 bounded integers.
3589
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003590- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3591 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3592 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3593 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3594 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3595 in existence.
3596
3597 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3598 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3599 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3600 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3601 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3602 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3603
3604 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3605 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3606 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3607 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3608
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003609- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3610 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3611 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3612
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003613- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3614
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003615- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3616 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3617 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3618 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3619
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003620- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3621 argument.
3622
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003623- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3624 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3625 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3626 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3627 [SF patch 560794].
3628
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003629- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3630 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3631 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003632 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3633 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3634 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003635
3636- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3637 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003638
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003639- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3640 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3641 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3642 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003643
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003644- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3645 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3646 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3647 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3648 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3649
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003650- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003651
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003652- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3653
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003654- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3655 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3656 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3657 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3658 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3659 identical to None.
3660
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003661- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3662 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3663 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3664 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3665 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3666 results now.
3667
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003668- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3669 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3670
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003671- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3672 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3673 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3674 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3675 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3676 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3677 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3678 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3679
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003680- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3681
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003682- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3683 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3684
3685- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3686 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3687 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3688 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3689 and other systems.
3690
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003691- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3692 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3693 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3694 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 +00003695 work well with these.
3696
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003697- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3698
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003699- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003700 connections.
3701
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003702- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3703 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3704 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3705
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003706- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3707 sets
3708
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003709- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3710 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3711 name.
3712
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003713- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3714 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3715 passed in.
3716
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003717- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003718 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003719 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3720 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003721
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003722- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3723
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003724- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3725
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003726- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3727 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3728 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3729
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003730- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3731 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3732 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3733 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003734 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003735
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003736- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003737 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003738 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003739
3740- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3741 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3742 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3743
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003744- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003745 the value of its expression argument.
3746
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003747- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3748 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3749 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3750
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003751- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3752 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3753 skipstone browser was included.
3754
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003755- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3756 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3757
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003758Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003760
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003761- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3762 names in addition to accepting file names.
3763
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003764- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3765 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3766 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3767 still used and useful.)
3768
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003769- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3770 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3771 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3772 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003773
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003774- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3775 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3776 the generated binary.
3777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003780
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003781- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3782
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003783- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3784 except in the hands of experts.
3785
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003786- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003787 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3788 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3789 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003790
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003791- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3792 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3793 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3794 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3795 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3796 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3797 builds.
3798
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003799- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3800 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3801 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3802 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3803 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3804 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3805 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3806 new type.
3807
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003808- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003809
3810 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3811 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3812 positive infinities.
3813
3814 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3815 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3816 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3817 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3818 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3819 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3820 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3821
3822 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3823
3824 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3825
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003826- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3827 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3828 size of the executable.
3829
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003830- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3831 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3832 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3833 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003834
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003835- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3836
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003837- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3838 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3839 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003840
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003841- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3842 well as Unix.
3843
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003844- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3845 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3846 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3847 modules in the README file for details.
3848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003849C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003851
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003852- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3853 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003854 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003855 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003856 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003857
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003858- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3859 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3860 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3861 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3862 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3863 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003864 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003865 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3866 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3867 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3868 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3869 aligned.)
3870
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003871- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3872 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3873 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3874
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003875- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3876 level.
3877
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003878- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3879 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3880 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3881 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3882 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3883
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003884- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3885 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3886 code.
3887
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003888- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3889 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3890 adjusting for negative indices.
3891
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003892- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3893 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3894 object.
3895
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003896- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3897 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3898 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3899
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003900- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3901 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003902
3903- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3904
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003905- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3906 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3907 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3908 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3909
3910- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3911
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003912- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003913
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003914- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003915 without going through the buffer API.
3916
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003918
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003919- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3920 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3921 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3922 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3923
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003924- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3925 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3926
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003927- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003928 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3929
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003930New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003932
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003933- OpenVMS is now supported.
3934
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003935- AtheOS is now supported.
3936
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003937- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3938
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003939- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3940
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003941Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942-----
3943
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003944- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3945 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3946 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003947
3948Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003950
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003951- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3952 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3953 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3954 bugs.
3955 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003956 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003957 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3958 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003959 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003960
3961- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003962 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003963
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003964- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3965 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3966
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003967- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3968 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003969 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003970 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3971
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003972- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3973 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3974 use files" uninstall option).
3975
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003976- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3977
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003978- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3979 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3980
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003981- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3982 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3983 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3984
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003985- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3986 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3987 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3988 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3989 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003990 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3991 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3992 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003993
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003994- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003995 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003996 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3997 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3998 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3999 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4000 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4001 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4002 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4003 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4004 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4005 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4006 work around.
4007
4008- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4009 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4010 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4011 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4012 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4013 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4014 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4015 specified with O_CREAT too).
4016
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004017Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018----
4019
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004020- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004021
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004022- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4023 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4024 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4025
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004026- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4027 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4028 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4029
4030- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4031 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4032 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4033 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4034 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4035 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4036 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4037 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004038
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004039- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4040 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4041 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004042
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004043- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4044 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4045 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4046 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4047 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004048
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004049- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4050 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4051 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004052
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004053- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4054 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004055
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004056- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4057 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4058 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4059 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4060 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004061
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004062- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4063 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4064 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4065
4066- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4067 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4068 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004069
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004070- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4071 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4072 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4073 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004074 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004075
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004076- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4077 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004078
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004079- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4080 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004081
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004082- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004083 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004084 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4085 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004086
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004087
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004088What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004089===============================
4090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4092
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004093Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004095
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004096- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4097 with a custom metaclass.
4098
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004099Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004101
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004102- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4103 are proxies.
4104
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004105Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004107
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004108- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4109 very short strings.
4110
4111- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4112 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4113 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4114 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4115 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4116
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004119
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004120- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4121 close or delete time).
4122
4123- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4124 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4125
4126- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4127
4128- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004129 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004130
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004131Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004133
4134Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004136
4137C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004139
4140New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004142
4143Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145
4146Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004149- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4150
4151- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4152 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4153
4154- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4155 deleted at process exit time.
4156
4157- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4158 in backslash.
4159
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004160Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004163- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4164 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4165 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4166
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004167
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004168What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004169===========================
4170
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4172
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004173Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004175
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004176- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4177 been extensively updated. See
4178
4179 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4180
4181 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4182
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004183- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4184 deleted!
4185
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004186- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4187 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4188 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4189 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4190 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4191
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004192- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4193
4194 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4195 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4196
4197 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4198 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4199 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4200 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4201 supported anyway.
4202
4203 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4204 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4205
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004206- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4207 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4208 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4209 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4210 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004211
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004212- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4213 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4214 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4215
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004216Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004218
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004219- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4220 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4221 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4222 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4223 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4224 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004225 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4226 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4227 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4228 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004229
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004230- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4231 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4232 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4233
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004234Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004236
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004237- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4238
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004242- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4243 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4244 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4245 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4246 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4247 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4248
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004249- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4250
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004251- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4252
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004253- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4254
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004255- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4256 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4257 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4258
4259- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4260
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004261Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004263
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004264- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4265 off a search on Google.
4266
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004267Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004269
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004270- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4271 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4272 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4273 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4274 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4275 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4276 other platforms should do likewise.
4277
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004278- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4279 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4280 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4281
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004282C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004284
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004285- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4286 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4287 producing key-value pairs.
4288
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004289- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004290 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004291 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4292 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4293 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4294 previously went unchallenged.
4295
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004298
4299Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004301
4302Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004304
4305Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004307
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004308- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4309 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004311- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4312 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4313 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4314 home.
4315
4316
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004317What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004318===========================
4319
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4321
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004322Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004324
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004325- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4326 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004327
4328 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004329 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004330
4331 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4332 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004333 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004334 This needs to be documented.
4335
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004336- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4337 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4338
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004339- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4340 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4341 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4342
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004343- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4344 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4345
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004346- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4347 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4348 class forbids it).
4349
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004350- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4351 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4352 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4353
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004354- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4355
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004356Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004358
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004359- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4360 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004361 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004362
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004363- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4364 (like 1 + '').
4365
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004366Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004368
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004369- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4370 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4371 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4372 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004373 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004374 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4375
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004376- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4377 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4378 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4379 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4380
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004381- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4382 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004383 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4384 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4385 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004386
4387- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4388 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004389
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004390- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4391 bytes on its input.
4392
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004393Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004395
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004396- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004397 convenience function.
4398
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004399- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4400 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4401 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004402 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4403 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4404 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4405 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4406 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4407 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004408
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004409- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4410 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4411 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4412 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4413
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004414- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4415 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4416 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4417
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004418- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4419 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4420 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4421 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4422
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004423- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4424 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004426 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4427 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4428 new -l and -e options.
4429
4430- statcache is now deprecated.
4431
4432- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4433 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004435 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4436 time properly taken into account.
4437
4438- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4439 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4440 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4441 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4442
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004443Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004445
4446Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004448
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004449- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4450 is built with libdb3 if available.
4451
4452- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4453
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004454C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004456
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004457- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4458 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4459 PySequence_Size().
4460
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004461- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4462
4463- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4464 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4465 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4466
4467- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4468 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4469
4470- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4471 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4472
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004473New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004475
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004476- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4477 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4478
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004479- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4480 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4481
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004482- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4483
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004484Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004486
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004487- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4488 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4489
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004490Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004492
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004493Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004495
4496- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4497 removed completely in the next release.
4498
4499- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4500 OSX.
4501
4502- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4503 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4504
4505- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4506
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004507
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004508What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004509===========================
4510
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4512
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004513Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004515
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004516- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004517 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004518 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004519 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4520 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004521 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4522 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004523 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4524 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004525
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004526- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4527 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4528
4529- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4530 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4531
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004532Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004534
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004535- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4536 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4537 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4538 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4539 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4540 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4541 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4542 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4543
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004544- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4545 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4546 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4547 example).
4548
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004549- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004550 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004551 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004552 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004553
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004554- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4555 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4556 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004557 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004558
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004559- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4560 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4561 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4562 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4563 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4564 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4565
4566 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4567
4568 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4569
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004570Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004572
4573- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4574
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004575- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4576
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004577- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4578 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004579
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004580- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4581 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4582 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4583 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4584 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4585 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004586 attributes.
4587
4588- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4589 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4590 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004591
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004592- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4593 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4594 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004595
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004596- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4597 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4598 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004599 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4600 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4601
4602- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4603 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004604
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004607
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004608- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4609 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4610
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004611- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4612 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4613 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4614 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4615
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004616- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4617 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4618 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4619 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4620
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004621 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4622 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4623 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4624 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4625 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4626 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4627 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4628 without losing information).
4629
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004630- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004631 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4632 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4633 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4634 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4635 module).
4636
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004637 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004638 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4639 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4640 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4641 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004642
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004643- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004644 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4645 encoding.
4646
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004647- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4648 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4649
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004651 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4652
4653- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4654 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4655 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4656 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4657
4658- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4659
4660- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4661 ON, and OFF.
4662
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004663- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4664 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4665
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004666Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004668
4669- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4670 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4671 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004672
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004673- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4674 been added: -X and -E.
4675
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004676Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004678
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004679- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4680 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4681
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004682C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004684
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004685- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4686 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4687 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4688 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4689 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4690
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004691- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4692 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4693 as long) arguments.
4694
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004695- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4696 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4697 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4698 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4699 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4700 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4701
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004702- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4703 input.
4704
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004705New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004707
4708Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004710
4711Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004713
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004714- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4715 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4716 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4717
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004718- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4719 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4720 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004721 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4724 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4725 import signal
4726 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004727
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004729 while 1:
4730 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004732 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4733 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4734 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4735 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004736
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004738What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4739===========================
4740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4742
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004743Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004745
4746- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4747 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4748 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4749
4750- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4751 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4752 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4753 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4754 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4755 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4756 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004757
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004758- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004759 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004760 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4761 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4762 associate a docstring with a property.
4763
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004764- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4765 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4766 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4767 other built-in object types.
4768
4769- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4770 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4771 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4772 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4773 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4774
4775- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4776 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4777
4778- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4779 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004780 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004781 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4782 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4783 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4784 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4785 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4786
4787- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4788 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4789 class.
4790
4791- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4792 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4793 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4794 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4795
4796- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4797 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4798 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4799 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4800
4801- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4802 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4803
4804- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4805 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4806 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4807 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4808 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004809 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004810 with the same value as s.
4811
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004812- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4813
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004814Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004816
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004817- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4818
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004819- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4820 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4821 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4822 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4823 objects.
4824
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004825- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4826 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004827 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4828 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4829
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004830- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4831 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4832 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004834Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004836
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004837- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4838 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4839 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4840 by the instances.
4841
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004842- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4843 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4844 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4845
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004846- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4847 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4848 before the entire comparison is complete.
4849
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004850- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4851 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4852 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4853
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004854- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4855 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4856 getwriter().
4857
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004858- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4859 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4860
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004861- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004862 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4863 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4864
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004865- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4866 iterable object.
4867
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004868- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4869 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004870
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004871- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4872 authentication.
4873
4874- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4875 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004876
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004877- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004878 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4879 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4880 a sample driver.)
4881
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004882Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004884
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004885- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4886 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4887 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4888 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4889 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4890 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4891 kernel has large file support.
4892
4893- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4894 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4895 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4896 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4897 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4898
4899- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4900 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4901 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4902
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004903C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004904-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004905
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004906- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4907 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4908
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004909New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004911
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004912- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4913 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4914
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004915Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004917
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004918- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4919 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4920 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4921 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4922 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4923
4924- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4925 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4926 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4927 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4928
4929- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4930 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4931
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004932Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004934
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004935- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004936 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4937 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004938
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004939
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004940What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4941===========================
4942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4944
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004945Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004947
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004948- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4949 big to represent as a C double.
4950
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004951- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4952 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4953 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4954 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4955 restriction).
4956
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004957- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4958 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4959 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4960 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4961 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4962
4963 >>> dir([])
4964 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4965 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4966 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4967 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4968 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4969 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4970 'reverse', 'sort']
4971
4972 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4973
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004974- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004975 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4976 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4977 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4978 OverflowError exception.
4979
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004980- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004981 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004982 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4983 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4984 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4985 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4986 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004987 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4989 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4990
4991 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4992 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4993 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4994 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004995
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004996- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004997 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4998 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4999 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5000 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5001 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5002 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5003 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5004 once it is created.
5005
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005006- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5007 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5008 (key, value) pairs.
5009
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005010- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005011 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5012 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5013
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005014- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5015 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5016 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5017 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5018 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005019
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005020- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005021 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5022 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5023
5024 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5025
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005026- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005027 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5028
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005029Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005031
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005032- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005033 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5034 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005035
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005036- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5037 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5038 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5039 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5040 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5041 in this area anymore).
5042
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005043- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5044 threading.Timer.
5045
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005046- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5047 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5048
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005049- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005050 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5051
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005052- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005053 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5054 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5055 converted to Python longs.
5056
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005057- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005058 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5059
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005060- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5061 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5062 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5063
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005064Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005066
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005067- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5068 division operators as per PEP 238.
5069
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005070Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005072
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005073- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5074 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5075 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5076 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5077
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005078C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005080
5081- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005082
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005083- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5084 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005085 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5088 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005089 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005091
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005092- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005093 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5094 module:
5095
5096 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005097
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005098 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5099 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005100
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005101 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5102 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005103
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005104 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5105
5106 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5107
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005108- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005109 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5110 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5111 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005112
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005113New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005115
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005116- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5117 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5118 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5119 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5120 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005122Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005124
5125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005127
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005128- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5129 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5130 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5131 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005132 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5133 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5134 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5135 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5136 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005137
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005138- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005139 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5140
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005141
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005142What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5143===========================
5144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5146
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005147Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005149
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005150- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5151 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5152
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005153- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5154 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5155 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005156
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005157- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5158 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5159 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5160 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005161
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005162- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5163
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005165
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005166Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005168
5169- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005170 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005171 the module docstring for details.
5172
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005173Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005175
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005176- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005177 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5178 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5179 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005180
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005181- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5182 Nick Mathewson.
5183
5184Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005186
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005187- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5188 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5189 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5190 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5191 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5192 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5193 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5194 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5195
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005196- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5197 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5198 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5199 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5200
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005201- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5202 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5203 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5204 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5205 come a long way).
5206
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005207- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5208 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5209 write filters for these warnings).
5210
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005211- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5212 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5213 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5214 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5215 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5216
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005217- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5218 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5219 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5220 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5221 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5222 older distribution.
5223
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005224Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005226
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005227- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5228 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005229 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005230
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005231- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5232 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5233 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5234
5235- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5236
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005237- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5238
5239- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5240
5241- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5242
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005244
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005245- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5246
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005247New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005248-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005249
5250C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005252
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005253- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5254 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5255 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5256 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5257 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5258 against buffer overruns.
5259
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005260- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005261 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5262 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005263 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5264 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5265 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5266
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005267- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5268 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5269 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5270 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5271 deprecated.
5272
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005273Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005275
5276- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5277 relevant is found.
5278
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005279
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005280What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005281===========================
5282
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5284
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005285Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005287
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005288- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5289 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5290 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5291 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5292 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5293 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5294 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5295 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005296 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005297 repaired.
5298
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005299- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005300 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005301 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5302 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5303 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5304 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5305 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5306 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5307 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5308 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5309
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005310- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5311 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5312 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5313 leading BMO character).
5314
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005315- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5316 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5317 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5318
5319 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5320 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5321 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005322
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005323 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5324 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5325 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5326 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5327 for various simple to use conversions.
5328
5329 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5330 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5331
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5333 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5334 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5335 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5336 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5337 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5338 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5339 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5340 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5341 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5342 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5343 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5344 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5345 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5346 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005347
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005348- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5349 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5350 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005351 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005352 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005353
5354 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005355 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5356 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5357 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5358 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5359 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005360 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5361 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005362
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005363 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5364 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5365 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005366 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005367
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005368- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5369 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5370 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5371 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5372 floating arithmetic,
5373
5374 x = 9007199254740992.0
5375 print long(x)
5376
5377 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5378 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5379 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5380 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5381 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5382 functions are of good quality).
5383
5384 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5385 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5386 algorithms to break.
5387
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005388- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5389 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5390 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5391 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5392 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5393 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5394 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5395 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5396 order.
5397
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005398- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5399 operation along the most common code paths.
5400
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005401- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5402 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5403
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005404- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5405 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5406 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5407 {}.update(UserDict())
5408
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005409- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5410 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5411 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5412 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5413 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5414 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5415 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5416 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5417
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005418- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005419 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005421 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005422 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5423 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005424 join() method of strings
5425 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005426 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5427 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005429 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005430
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005431- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5432 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5433
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005434- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5435 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5436
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005437- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5438 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5439 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5440 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5441
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005442- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5443 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005444 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005445 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5446 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005447
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005448- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5449
5450
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005451Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005453
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005454- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005455 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005456 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5457 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5458
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005459- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5460 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5461
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005462- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5463 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5464 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5465 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5466
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005467- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5468 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5469 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5470
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005471- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5472
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005473- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5474
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005475- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5476 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5477 that are still imported into string.py).
5478
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005479- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5480
5481- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5482 Now it does.
5483
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005484- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5485
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005486- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5487 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5488 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5489 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5490 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005491 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5492 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005493
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005494- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5495 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5496 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5497 'help(object)'.
5498
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005499Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005501
5502- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005503 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005504 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5505 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5506
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005507- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005508 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5509 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005510
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005511C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005513
5514- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5515 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005516
5517----
5518
5519**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**