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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000031- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
32 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
33 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
34 Jython.
35
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
39Library
40-------
41
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000042- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
43 from a tarfile.
44
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000045- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
46 GNU longname/longlink creation.
47
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000048- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
49 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
50 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
51 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
52
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000053- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
54 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
55
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000056- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
57 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
58 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
59 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
60 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
61 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
62 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
63 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
64 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
65 by some other method in progress).
66
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000067- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
68 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
69 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000070
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000071- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
72
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000073- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
74 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
75 AM Kuchling.
76
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000077- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
78 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
79 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
80
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000081- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
82 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
83 instead of unsigned.
84
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000085- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000086 no longer part of the public API.
87
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000088- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
89 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
90 string methods of the same name).
91
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000092- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
93 SF patch 982681.
94
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000095- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000096 SF patch 945642.
97
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000098- doctest unittest integration improvements:
99
100 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
101
102 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
103 DocTestSuites.
104
105- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
106 that provide thread-local data.
107
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000108- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
109 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
110
111
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000112Tools/Demos
113-----------
114
115Build
116-----
117
118C API
119-----
120
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000121- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
122 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
123
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000124Documentation
125-------------
126
127Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
128
129 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
130 assigning thier values
131
132 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
133
134 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
135
136
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000137New platforms
138-------------
139
140Tests
141-----
142
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000143- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
144 platforms that use the Makefile.
145
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000146Windows
147-------
148
149Mac
150---
151
152
153
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000154What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
155=================================
156
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000157*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000158
159Core and builtins
160-----------------
161
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000162- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
163 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
164 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
165 objects now (one object instead of three).
166
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000167- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
168 Windows DLLs.
169
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000170- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
171
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000172- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
173 a new .pyc magic.
174
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000175- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
176 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
177 be there.
178
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000179- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
180 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
181 the LC_NUMERIC category.
182
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000183- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
184 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
185 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
186
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000187- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
188
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000189- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
190 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
191 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000192
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000193- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
194 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
195
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000196- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
197
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000198- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000199 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000200
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000201- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
202
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000203- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
204
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000205- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
206 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
207
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000208- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
209 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
210 Fixes bug #858016 .
211
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000212- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
213 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
214 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
215
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000216- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
217 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
218 improves their performance (about 35%).
219
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000220- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
221 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
222 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
223
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000224- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
225 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
226 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
227 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
228
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000229- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
230 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
231 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
232 length is not known).
233
234- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
235 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000236 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
237 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000238 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
239
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000240- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
241 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
242
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000243- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
244 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
245 keyword arguments.
246
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000247- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
248 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
249 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
250
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000251- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
252 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
253 cases.
254
255- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
256 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
257 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
258 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
259 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
260 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
261 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
262 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
263 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
264 a release build.
265
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000266- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
267 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
268
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000269- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000270 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000271
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000272- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
273 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
274 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
275 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
276 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
277 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
278 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
279 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
280 destroyed.
281
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000282- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
283 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
284 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
285 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
286 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
287 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
288 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
289 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
290
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000291- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
292 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
293 character other than a space.
294
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000295- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
296 by the function object or by the method object, the function
297 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
298 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
299 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
300 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
301 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
302 attributes with the same name.
303
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000304- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
305 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
306 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
307 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
308 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
309 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
310 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
311 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
312 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
313 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
314 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
315 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
316 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
317 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000318
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000319- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
320 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
321 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
322 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
323 This has been repaired.
324
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000325- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
326
327- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
328
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000329- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
330 over a sequence.
331
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000332- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000333 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000334
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000335- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
336
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000337- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
338 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
339 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
340 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
341 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
342 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
343 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
344 records with equal keys is unchanged).
345
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000346- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
347 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
348 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
349
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000350- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
351 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
352 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
353 freelist.
354
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000355- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
356 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
357
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000358- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
359 number.
360
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000361- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
362 a TypeError exception.
363
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000364- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
365 820195.
366
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000367- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
368 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
369 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
370
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000371- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000372 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
373 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000374
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000375- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
376 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
377 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
378
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000379- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
380 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000381 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000382
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000383- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000384 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
385 the first call.
386
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000387
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000388Extension modules
389-----------------
390
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000391- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
392 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
393
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000394- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
395 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
396 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
397 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
398 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
399 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
400 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000401
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000402- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
403
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000404- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
405
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000406- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
407 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
408
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000409- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
410 fewer false positives.
411
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000412- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
413 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
414
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000415- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000416 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
417
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000418- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000419 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000420 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
421 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
422 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000423
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000424- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
425 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
426 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
427 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
428
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000429- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
430 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
431 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
432 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
433 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
434 #897625.
435
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000436- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
437 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
438
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000439- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
440 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
441 and pops on either side of the deque.
442
443- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
444 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
445
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000446- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
447 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
448 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
449 other functions that expect a function argument.
450
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000451- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
452
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000453- os.getsid was added.
454
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000455- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
456 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
457 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
458
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000459- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
460
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000461- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
462
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000463- readline.clear_history was added.
464
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000465- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
466
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000467- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
468
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000469- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
470
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000471- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
472
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000473- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
474
475- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
476
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000477- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
478
479- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
480
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000481- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
482 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
483 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
484
485- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
486 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
487 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
488 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
489 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
490 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
491 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
492
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000493- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
494 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
495 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
496 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000497
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000498- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000499 iterators from a single iterable.
500
501- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
502 of raising a TypeError exception.
503
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000504- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
505 as parameter.
506
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000507Library
508-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000509
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000510- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
511 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
512 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000513
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000514- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
515 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
516 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000517
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000518- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000519
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000520- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
521 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000522
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000523- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
524 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
525
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000526- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
527
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000528- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000529 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000530
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000531- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
532 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
533
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000534- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
535
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000536- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
537 on cygwin and mingw32.
538
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000539- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
540
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000541- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
542 module.
543
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000544- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
545 installation scheme for all platforms.
546
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000547- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000548 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000549
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000550- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
551 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
552 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
553
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000554- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
555 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
556 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
557
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000558- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
559
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000560- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
561
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000562- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
563 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
564
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000565- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
566 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
567 type pattern with the same value exists.
568
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000569- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
570 when run from the command prompt).
571
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000572- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
573 not taken into consideration when caching value.
574
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000575- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
576 default sort).
577
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000578- Added global runctx function to profile module
579
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000580- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
581
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000582- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
583
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000584- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
585
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000586- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000587 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
588 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
589 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
590 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
591 accordingly.
592
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000593- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
594 decoding standards.
595
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000596- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
597 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
598 called for all requests.
599
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000600- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
601 they are passed to the compiler.
602
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000603- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
604 indent, width and depth.
605
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000606- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
607 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
608
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000609- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
610 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
611
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000612- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
613
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000614- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
615
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000616- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
617
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000618- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
619 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
620
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000621- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000622 for better performance.
623
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000624- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000625
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000626- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
627 a string).
628
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000629- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
630
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000631- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
632
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000633- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
634
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000635- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
636
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000637- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
638 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
639 list of fieldnames.
640
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000641- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
642 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
643
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000644- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
645
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000646- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
647 empty lists.
648
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000649- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
650 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
651 and shelves.
652
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000653- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
654 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
655
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000656- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000657 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
658 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000659
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000660- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
661 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000662 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000663
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000664- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000665 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
666 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
667
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000668- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
669 and removed in Py2.4.
670
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000671- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
672
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000673- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
674
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000675Tools/Demos
676-----------
677
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000678- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
679 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
680
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000681- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
682
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000683- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
684 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
685 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
686 destination in situations where both files are given.
687
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000688- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
689 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
690 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
691 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
692
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000693- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
694
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000695- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
696 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
697 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
698 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
699 now.
700
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000701- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
702 in effect
703
704- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
705 C-c C-h
706
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000707- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
708 -d option was given.
709
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000710Build
711-----
712
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000713- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
714 build under OS X.
715
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000716- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
717 --enable-profiling.
718
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000719- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
720 is configured --with-tsc.
721
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000722- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
723 on AMD64.
724
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000725- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
726 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
727
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000728- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
729 removed.
730
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000731- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
732 supported (see PEP 11).
733
734- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
735
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000736- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
737
738- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
739 (see PEP 11).
740
741- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
742 sizeof(char) must be 1.
743
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000744C API
745-----
746
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000747- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
748 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
749 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
750
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000751- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
752 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
753 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
754 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
755
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000756- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
757 generator objects.
758
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000759- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
760 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000761 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
762 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000763
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000764- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
765 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
766
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000767- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
768 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
769 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
770 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
771 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
772
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000773- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
774 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
775 about 10% faster.
776
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000777- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
778 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
779
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000780- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
781 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
782 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
783 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
784
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000785Windows
786-------
787
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000788- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
789 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
790 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
791 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
792
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000793- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
794 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
795 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
796
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000797
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000798What's New in Python 2.3 final?
799===============================
800
801*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
802
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000803IDLE
804----
805
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000806- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
807 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
808 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
809 context-menu actions.
810
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000811- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
812 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
813 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
814 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
815 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
816 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
817 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
818 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
819 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
820
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000821
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000822What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
823=============================================
824
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000825*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000826
827Core and builtins
828-----------------
829
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000830- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000831 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000832 comment at the end are still unsupported.
833
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000834Extension modules
835-----------------
836
837- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
838 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
839 than once. This has been fixed.
840
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000841- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
842 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
843 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
844 call.
845
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000846- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
847
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000848Library
849-------
850
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000851- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
852 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
853
854- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
855 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
856 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
857 restored.
858
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000859IDLE
860----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000861
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000862- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000863
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000864Build
865-----
866
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000867- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
868 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
869
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000870C API
871-----
872
873Windows
874-------
875
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000876- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
877 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
878
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000879- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
880
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000881Mac
882---
883
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000884- Various fixes to pimp.
885
886- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
887
888- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
889 more problems than it solves.
890
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000891
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000892What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
893=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000894
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000895*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
896
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000897Core and builtins
898-----------------
899
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000900- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
901 by sys.setcheckinterval().
902
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000903- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
904 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000905 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000906
907- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
908 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
909 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000910 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000911
912- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
913 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000914
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000915- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
916 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
917 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
918
919- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000920 770247.
921
922- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000923
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000924Extension modules
925-----------------
926
927- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
928 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
929
930- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
931
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000932- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
933
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000934- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
935 contained within the _strptime module.
936
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000937- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
938 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
939
940- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000941 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
942
943- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
944 the find_class attribute, if present.
945
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000946- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000947
948 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
949 (SF bug 763298).
950
951 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000952 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
953 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
954 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000955
956 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
957
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000958Library
959-------
960
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000961- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
962
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000963- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
964 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
965 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
966 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
967 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
968 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
969 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
970 or Tester().
971
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000972- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
973 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
974 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
975 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
976 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
977 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
978 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
979 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
980 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000981
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000982 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000983
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000984- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
985 weren't before was an oversight.
986
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000987- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
988 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
989
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000990- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
991 when there are no lines.
992
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000993- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
994 which could occur with Tk 8.4
995
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000996- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
997 to child processes.
998
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000999- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1000
1001- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1002
1003- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1004 xmlrpclib.
1005
1006- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1007 responses.
1008
1009- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1010 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1011
1012- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1013 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1014 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1015
1016- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1017 used as patterns.
1018
1019- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1020 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1021 than Tk 8.3.
1022
1023- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1024
1025- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001026
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001027Tools/Demos
1028-----------
1029
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001030- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1031
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001032- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1033
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001034- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001035
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001036Build
1037-----
1038
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001039- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1040
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001041- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1042
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001043- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1044 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001045
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001046- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1047 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1048 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001049
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001050C API
1051-----
1052
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001053- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1054 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1055
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001056Windows
1057-------
1058
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001059- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1060 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1061 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1062 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1063 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1064 Python exception ::
1065
1066 thread.error: can't start new thread
1067
1068 is raised now.
1069
1070- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1071 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1072 instead of from DLL teardown.
1073
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001074Mac
1075---
1076
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001077- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001078 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001079 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1080 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1081 the executable in the bundle.
1082
1083- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001084
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001085- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1086
1087- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1088 on Panther.
1089
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001090What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1091================================
1092
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001093*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001094
1095Core and builtins
1096-----------------
1097
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001098- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1099 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1100 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1101 with the -i option.
1102
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001103- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1104 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1105
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001106- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1107 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1108
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001109- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1110 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1111 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1112 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1113 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1114 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1115 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1116 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1117 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1118 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1119 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1120 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1121 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001122
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001123- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1124 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1125 embedded in a lambda expression.
1126
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001127- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1128 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1129 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1130 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1131 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1132
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001133- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1134 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1135 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1136
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001137- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1138 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1139
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001140- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1141 It's writable again.
1142
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001143- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1144 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1145 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001146 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001147
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001148- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1149 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1150 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1151
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001152Extension modules
1153-----------------
1154
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001155- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1156 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1157
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001158- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1159 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1160 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1161 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1162
1163- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1164 collection.
1165
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001166- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1167 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1168 unique within a single program run.
1169
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001170- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1171 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1172
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001173- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1174 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1175
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001176- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1177 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001178
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001179- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1180
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001181- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1182 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1183
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001184- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1185 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1186 for many BSD-derived systems.
1187
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001188
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001189Library
1190-------
1191
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001192- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1193 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1194 primary ones:
1195
1196 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1197 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1198 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1199
1200 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1201 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1202 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1203 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1204 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1205 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1206
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001207- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1208 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1209 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1210 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1211 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1212 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1213 argument.
1214
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001215- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1216 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1217 in the archive.
1218
1219- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1220 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1221
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001222- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1223 569574).
1224
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001225- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1226 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1227 no more.
1228
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001229- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1230 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1231 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1232 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1233 code coverage.
1234
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001235- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1236 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1237 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001238 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1239 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001240
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001241- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1242 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1243 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001244 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001245
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001246- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1247
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001248- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1249 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1250 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1251 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1252
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001253- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1254 handling.
1255
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001256- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1257 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1258
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001259- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1260 in socket.py.
1261
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001262- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1263
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001264- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1265 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1266 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1267 opener with proxy support.
1268
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001269- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1270
1271- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1272
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001273Tools/Demos
1274-----------
1275
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001276- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1277
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001278- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1279
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001280- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1281 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001282
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001283- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1284 files.
1285
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001286Build
1287-----
1288
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001289- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001290 different root directory.
1291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001292C API
1293-----
1294
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001295- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1296 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1297 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1298 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1299 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1300 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1301 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1302 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1303 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1304 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1305
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001306- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1307 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1308 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1309 from Python.
1310
1311
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001312New platforms
1313-------------
1314
1315None this time.
1316
1317Tests
1318-----
1319
1320- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1321 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1322
1323Windows
1324-------
1325
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001326- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1327
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001328- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1329 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1330 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1331 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1332 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1333 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1334 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1335 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1336 that's what it's for.
1337
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001338Mac
1339---
1340
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001341- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1342 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1343 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1344 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001345- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1346 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1347- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001348
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001349SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1350------------------------------------
1351
1352430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1353598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1354622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1355661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1356683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1357697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1358713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1359724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1360727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1361729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1362730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1363731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1364732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1365733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1366735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1367740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1368744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1369745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1370747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1371749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1372751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1373753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1374755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1375757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1376760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1377
1378
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001379What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1380================================
1381
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001382*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001383
1384Core and builtins
1385-----------------
1386
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001387- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1388 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1389
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001390- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1391 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1392 and cannot be strings).
1393
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001394- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1395 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1396 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1397 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1398
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001399- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1400 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1401 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1402 Python itself.
1403
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001404- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1405 the referenced object, if it has one.
1406
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001407- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1408 the thread started at
1409 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1410
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001411- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1412 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1413 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1414 placed on a list index.
1415
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001416- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1417 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1418 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1419 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1420
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001421- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1422 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1423 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1424 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1425 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1426 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1427 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1428
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001429- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1430 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1431 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1432 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1433 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1434
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001435- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1436 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001437
1438- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1439 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1440 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1441 #693195.)
1442
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001443- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1444 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001445
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001446- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001447 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001448 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1449 interpreter executions, would fail.
1450
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001451- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001452 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001453 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001454
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001455Extension modules
1456-----------------
1457
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001458- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1459 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1460 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1461 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1462
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001463- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1464 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1465
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001466- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1467 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1468 and Greg Chapman.)
1469
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001470- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1471 recursively.
1472
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001473- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001474 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1475 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1476 leaks.
1477
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001478- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1479
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001480- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1481 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1482 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1483 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1484 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1485 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1486 #705836.
1487
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001488- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001489 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1490
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001491- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1492 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1493 See SF bug #692416.
1494
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001495- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1496 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1497
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001498- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1499 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1500 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001501
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001502- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001503 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1504 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1505
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001506- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1507 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1508 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1509 timeouts to work properly.
1510
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001511Library
1512-------
1513
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001514- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1515 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1516 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1517 future release.
1518
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001519- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1520 for querying platform dependent features.
1521
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001522- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001523
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001524- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1525 pickle protocol versions.
1526
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001527- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1528 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1529 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1530
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001531- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1532
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001533- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1534 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1535 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1536 modules.
1537
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001538- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1539 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1540 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1541
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001542- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1543 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1544
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001545- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1546 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1547 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1548
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001549- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001550 MS Office extensions.
1551
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001552- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1553 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1554
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001555- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1556 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1557
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001558- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1559 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1560 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1561 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1562 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1563 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1564
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001565- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1566 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1567 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001568
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001569- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1570 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1571 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1572
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001573- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1574
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001575- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1576 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1577 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1578
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001579Tools/Demos
1580-----------
1581
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001582- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1583 See the module docstring for details.
1584
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001585Build
1586-----
1587
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001588- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1589 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001590
1591C API
1592-----
1593
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001594- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1595
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001596- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1597 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1598 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1599
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001600- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1601 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001602
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001603 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1604 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1605 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001606
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001607- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001608 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1609
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001610- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1611 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1612 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001613
1614New platforms
1615-------------
1616
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001617None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001618
1619Tests
1620-----
1621
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001622- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1623 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001624
1625Windows
1626-------
1627
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001628- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1629 function.
1630
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001631- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1632 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001633
1634Mac
1635---
1636
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001637- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1638 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001639
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001640- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1641 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001642
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001643- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1644 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1645 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001646
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001647- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001648 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1649 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001650
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001651- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1652 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001653
1654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001655What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1656=================================
1657
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001658*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001659
1660Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001661-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001662
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001663- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1664 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1665 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1666
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001667- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1668 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1669 (SF patch #664376.)
1670
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001671- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1672 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1673 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1674 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1675 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1676 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001677 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001678
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001679- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1680 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1681 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1682 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001683 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001684
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001685- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1686 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1687 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1688 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1689 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1690 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1691 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1692 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1693 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1694 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1695 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1696
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001697- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1698 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1699 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1700 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1701 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1702 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1703
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001704- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1705 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1706
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001707- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1708 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1709 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1710 case.)
1711
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001712- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1713 passed as unicode strings.
1714
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001715- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1716 See SF bug #683467.
1717
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001718- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1719 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1720
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001721- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1722
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001723- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1724
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001725- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1726 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1727 arguments.
1728
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001729- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1730 See SF bug #667147.
1731
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001732- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001733 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001734 See SF bug #676155.
1735
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001736- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001737 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001738 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1739 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1740 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1741 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1742 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1743 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001744
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001745Extension modules
1746-----------------
1747
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001748- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1749 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1750 tp_as_number pointer.
1751
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001752- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1753 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1754 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1755 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1756 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1757
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001758- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1759
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001760- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1761
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001762- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001763 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001764 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1765 patch #678531.)
1766
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001767- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1768 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1769
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001770- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1771 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1772
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001773- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1774
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001775- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1776 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1777 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1778
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001779- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1780
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001781- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1782 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1783
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001784- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001785
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001786- datetime changes:
1787
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001788 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1789
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001790 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1791 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1792 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1793 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1794 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1795 now.
1796
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001797 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001798 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1799 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001800
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001801 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001802 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001803 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1804 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1805 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1806 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001807
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001808 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1809 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1810 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001811 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1812
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001813 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1814 by a later example coded by Guido.
1815
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001816 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001817 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1818 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1819 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001820 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1821 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1822
1823 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1824 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1825 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1826 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1827 tzinfo subclass instance.
1828
1829 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1830 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1831 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1832 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1833 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1834 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1835 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1836 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001837
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001838 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1839 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1840 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1841 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1842 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001843 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1844
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001845 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001846
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001847 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1848 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1849 as a naive datetime object.
1850
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001851 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1852 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1853 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1854
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001855 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1856 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1857 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1858 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1859 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1860 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1861 comparison.
1862
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001863 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1864 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1865 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1866 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001867 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001868
1869 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001870
1871 and ::
1872
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001873 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1874
1875 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1876 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1877 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1878 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1879
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001880 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1881 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1882 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1883 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1884 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1885
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001886 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1887 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001888 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1889 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001890
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001891Library
1892-------
1893
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001894- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1895 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1896
1897- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1898 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1899 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1900 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1901 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1902 See PEP 307 for details.
1903
1904- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1905 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1906
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001907- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1908 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001909 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001910 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1911 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001912 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001913
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001914- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1915 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1916
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001917- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1918 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1919 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1920
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001921- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1922
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001923- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1924 exception.
1925
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001926- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1927 class.
1928
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001929- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1930 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1931 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1932
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001933- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1934 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1935
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001936- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001937 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1938 See SF bug #659228.
1939
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001940- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1941 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1942 See SF patch #651082.
1943
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001944- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001945
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001946- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1947 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1948
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001949- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001950 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001951
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001952- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1953 DOS paths from other platforms.
1954
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001955Tools/Demos
1956-----------
1957
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001958- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1959 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1960 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1961 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1962 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1963 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1964 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1965 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1966 example:
1967
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001968 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1969 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001970
1971 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1972
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001973
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001974Build
1975-----
1976
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001977- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1978 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1979 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001980 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1981
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001982 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1983
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001984- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1985 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1986 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1987 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1988 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1989 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1990 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1991 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1992 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1993
1994- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1995 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1996 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1997 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1998
1999- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2000 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002002C API
2003-----
2004
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002005- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2006 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002007
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002008- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2009 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2010 tp_as_number pointer.
2011
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002012- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2013 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2014 (SF #681367)
2015
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002016- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2017 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2018 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2019 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002021Tests
2022-----
2023
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002024- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002025 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2026 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2027 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2028 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2029 pydoc.)
2030
2031- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2032
2033- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002034
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002035Windows
2036-------
2037
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002038- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2039 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2040 time).
2041
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002042- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2043 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2044
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002045- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2046 release without strong cryptography.
2047
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002048- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002049 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002050
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002051- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2052 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2053
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002054Mac
2055---
2056
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002057- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2058 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002059
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002060- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2061 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2062 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002063
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002064- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2065 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002066
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002067- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2068 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2069 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2070 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002071
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002072- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002073 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2074 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2075 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002076
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002078What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002079=================================
2080
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002081*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002083Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002084--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002085
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002086- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2087
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002088- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2089 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002090 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002091 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002092 a different meaning than before.
2093
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002094- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002095 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002096 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002097
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002098- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002099 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002100 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002101
2102- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2103 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2104 and deallocation.
2105
2106- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2107 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2108
2109- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2110 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2111 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2112 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2113 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2114
2115- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2116 now detected by the garbage collector.
2117
2118- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2119 [SF bug 519621]
2120
2121- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2122 identifier.
2123
2124- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2125 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2126 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2127 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2128 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2129 [SF bug 563060]
2130
2131- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2132 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2133 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2134 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2135 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2136
2137- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2138 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2139 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2140
2141- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2142
2143- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2144 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2145 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2146 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2147 state of the slots would be lost.)
2148
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002149Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002150-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002151
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002152- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002153 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2154 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2155 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2156 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002157 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2158 Jython 2.1.
2159
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002160- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002161 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002162 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2163 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2164 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2165 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2166 these, see PEP 302.
2167
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002168- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2169 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2170 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2171
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002172- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2173 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2174 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2175
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002176- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2177 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2178 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2179
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002180- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2181 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2182 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2183 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2184 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2185 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2186 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2187 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2188 releases or implementations.
2189
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002190- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002191 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2192 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002193
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002194- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2195 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2196
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002197- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2198 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2199 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2200
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002201- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2202 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2203
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002204- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2205 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002206 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2207 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002208
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002209- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2210 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2211 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2212 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2213 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2214
2215 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2216 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2217 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2218 pattern.
2219
2220 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2221 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2222 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2223 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2224
2225 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2226 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2227 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2228 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2229 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2230 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2231
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002232- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2233 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2234 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2235 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2236 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2237 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2238 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2239 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002240
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002241- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2242 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2243 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2244 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2245 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002246 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2247 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2248 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2249 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2250 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2251 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2252 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002253
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002254- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2255 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2256
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002257- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2258 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2259 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2260 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2261 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2262 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2263 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2264 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2265 to Zack Weinberg!
2266
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002267- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2268 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2269 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2270 type. This has been fixed now.
2271
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002272- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2273 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2274 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2275
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002276- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2277 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2278 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2279 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2280 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2281 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2282 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2283 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002284 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002285
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002286- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2287 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2288 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002289
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002290- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2291 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2292 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2293 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2294 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2295 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2296 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2297 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002298 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002299 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2300 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2301
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002302- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2303 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2304 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2305 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2306 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2307 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2308 this.)
2309
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002310- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2311 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002312 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002313 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002314 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2315 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002316 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2317 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002318
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002319- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2320 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2321 currently running.
2322
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002323- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2324 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2325 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2326 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2327
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002328- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2329 as directory names.
2330
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002331- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2332 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2333
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002334- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2335 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2336
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002337- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002338 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2339 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002340
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002341- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2342 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2343 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2344 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2345 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2346
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002347- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2348 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2349 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2350 removed.
2351
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002352- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2353 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2354 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2355
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002356- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2357 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2358 to __debug__.
2359
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002360- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2361 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2362 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2363
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002364- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2365 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2366 deprecated now.
2367
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002368- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2369 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2370 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002371
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002372- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2373 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2374 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2375 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2376 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002377
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002378- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2379 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2380
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002381- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2382 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2383 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002384 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002385 is backward compatible.
2386
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002387- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2388 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2389 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2390 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2391 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2392
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002393- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2394 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2395 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2396 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2397 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2398 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002399
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002400- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2401 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2402
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002403- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2404 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2405
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002406- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2407 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2408 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2409 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2410 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2411
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002412- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2413 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2414 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2415
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002416- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002417 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2418
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002419- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2420 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2421 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002422
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002423- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2424 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2425
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002426- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2427 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2428 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2429
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002430- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002432Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002433-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002434
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002435- Added three operators to the operator module:
2436 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2437 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2438 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2439
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002440- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2441
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002442- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2443 archives.
2444
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002445- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2446 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2447 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2448
2449 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2450
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002451- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2452 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2453 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002454 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002455
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002456- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2457 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2458 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2459 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002460 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2461 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2462 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2463 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002464
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002465- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2466 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002467
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002468- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2469
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002470- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2471 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2472
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002473- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2474 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2475 supported.
2476
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002477- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2478
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002479- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2480 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002481
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002482- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2483 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2484
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002485- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2486
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002487- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2488 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2489
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002490- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2491 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2492 functions but callable type objects.
2493
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002494- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002495 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002496 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002497
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002498- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2499 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002500
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002501- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2502 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002503
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002504- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2505 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2506 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2507 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2508
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002509- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2510 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002511
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002512- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2513 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2514 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2515 and __imul__.
2516
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002517- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002518 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2519 is called.
2520
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002521- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2522 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2523 interpreter was compiled.
2524
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002525- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2526 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2527 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002528 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002529 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2530 1, not 2.
2531
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002532- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2533 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2534 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2535 limit.
2536
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002537- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2538 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2539 bug #623464.
2540
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002541- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2542 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2543 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2544 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2545
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002546Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002548
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002549- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2550
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002551- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2552 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2553 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2554 with Python 2.3a2.
2555
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002556- os.path exposes getctime.
2557
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002558- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002559 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002560 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002561 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002562 unit tests of floating point results.
2563
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002564- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2565 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2566 has been increased.
2567
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002568- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2569 executed.
2570
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002571- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2572 postinstallation script.
2573
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002574- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2575 test the current module.
2576
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002577- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002578 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2579 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2580 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2581 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2582
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002583- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002584 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002585 Ward's Optik package.
2586
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002587- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2588 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2589 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2590 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2591
2592- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2593 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002594 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002595
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002596- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2597 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2598 shelf are binary pickles.
2599
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002600- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2601 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2602
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002603- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2604 modules are iterators now.
2605
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002606- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2607 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2608 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2609 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2610 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2611 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002612
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002613- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2614 with their entity value.
2615
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002616- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2617
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002618- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2619 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002620
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002621- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2622 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002623 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002624
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002625- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2626 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2627 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2628 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2629 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2630 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2631 main():
2632
2633 import locale
2634 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2635
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002636- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2637 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2638
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002639- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2640 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2641 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2642 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2643 to the new standard.
2644
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002645- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2646 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2647 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2648 an extension to the database.
2649
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002650- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2651 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2652 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2653 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002654 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002655
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002656- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002657 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002658
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002659- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2660 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2661 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2662 bounded integers.
2663
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002664- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2665 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2666 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2667 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2668 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2669 in existence.
2670
2671 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2672 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2673 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2674 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2675 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2676 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2677
2678 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2679 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2680 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2681 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2682
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002683- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2684 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2685 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2686
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002687- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2688
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002689- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2690 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2691 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2692 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2693
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002694- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2695 argument.
2696
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002697- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2698 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2699 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2700 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2701 [SF patch 560794].
2702
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002703- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2704 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2705 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002706 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2707 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2708 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002709
2710- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2711 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002712
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002713- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2714 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2715 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2716 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002717
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002718- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2719 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2720 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2721 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2722 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2723
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002724- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002725
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002726- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2727
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002728- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2729 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2730 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2731 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2732 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2733 identical to None.
2734
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002735- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2736 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2737 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2738 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2739 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2740 results now.
2741
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002742- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2743 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2744
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002745- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2746 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2747 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2748 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2749 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2750 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2751 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2752 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2753
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002754- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2755
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002756- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2757 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2758
2759- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2760 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2761 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2762 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2763 and other systems.
2764
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002765- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2766 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2767 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2768 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 +00002769 work well with these.
2770
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002771- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2772
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002773- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002774 connections.
2775
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002776- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2777 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2778 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2779
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002780- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2781 sets
2782
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002783- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2784 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2785 name.
2786
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002787- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2788 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2789 passed in.
2790
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002791- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002792 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002793 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2794 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002795
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002796- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2797
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002798- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2799
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002800- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2801 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2802 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2803
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002804- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2805 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2806 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2807 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002808 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002809
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002810- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002811 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002812 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002813
2814- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2815 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2816 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2817
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002818- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002819 the value of its expression argument.
2820
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002821- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2822 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2823 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2824
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002825- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2826 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2827 skipstone browser was included.
2828
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002829- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2830 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002832Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002834
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002835- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2836 names in addition to accepting file names.
2837
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002838- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2839 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2840 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2841 still used and useful.)
2842
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002843- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2844 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2845 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2846 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002847
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002848- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2849 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2850 the generated binary.
2851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002852Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002854
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002855- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2856
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002857- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2858 except in the hands of experts.
2859
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002860- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002861 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2862 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2863 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002864
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002865- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2866 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2867 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2868 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2869 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2870 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2871 builds.
2872
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002873- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2874 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2875 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2876 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2877 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2878 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2879 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2880 new type.
2881
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002882- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002883
2884 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2885 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2886 positive infinities.
2887
2888 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2889 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2890 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2891 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2892 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2893 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2894 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2895
2896 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2897
2898 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2899
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002900- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2901 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2902 size of the executable.
2903
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002904- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2905 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2906 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2907 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002908
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002909- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2910
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002911- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2912 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2913 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002914
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002915- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2916 well as Unix.
2917
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002918- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2919 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2920 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2921 modules in the README file for details.
2922
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002923C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002925
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002926- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2927 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002928 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002929 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002930 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002931
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002932- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2933 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2934 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2935 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2936 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2937 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002938 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002939 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2940 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2941 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2942 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2943 aligned.)
2944
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002945- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2946 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2947 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2948
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002949- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2950 level.
2951
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002952- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2953 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2954 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2955 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2956 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2957
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002958- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2959 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2960 code.
2961
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002962- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2963 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2964 adjusting for negative indices.
2965
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002966- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2967 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2968 object.
2969
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002970- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2971 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2972 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2973
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002974- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2975 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002976
2977- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2978
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002979- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2980 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2981 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2982 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2983
2984- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2985
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002986- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002987
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002988- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002989 without going through the buffer API.
2990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002992
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002993- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2994 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2995 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2996 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2997
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002998- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2999 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3000
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003001- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003002 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003006
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003007- OpenVMS is now supported.
3008
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003009- AtheOS is now supported.
3010
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003011- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3012
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003013- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3014
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003015Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-----
3017
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003018- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3019 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3020 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003021
3022Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003024
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003025- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3026 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3027 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3028 bugs.
3029 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003030 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003031 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3032 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003033 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003034
3035- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003036 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003037
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003038- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3039 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3040
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003041- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3042 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003043 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003044 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3045
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003046- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3047 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3048 use files" uninstall option).
3049
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003050- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3051
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003052- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3053 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3054
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003055- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3056 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3057 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3058
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003059- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3060 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3061 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3062 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3063 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003064 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3065 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3066 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003067
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003068- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003069 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003070 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3071 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3072 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3073 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3074 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3075 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3076 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3077 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3078 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3079 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3080 work around.
3081
3082- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3083 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3084 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3085 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3086 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3087 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3088 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3089 specified with O_CREAT too).
3090
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003091Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003092----
3093
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003094- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003095
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003096- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3097 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3098 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3099
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003100- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3101 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3102 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3103
3104- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3105 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3106 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3107 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3108 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3109 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3110 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3111 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003112
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003113- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3114 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3115 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003116
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003117- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3118 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3119 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3120 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3121 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003122
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003123- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3124 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3125 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003127- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3128 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003130- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3131 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3132 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3133 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3134 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003135
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003136- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3137 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3138 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3139
3140- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3141 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3142 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003143
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003144- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3145 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3146 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3147 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003148 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003150- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3151 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003152
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003153- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3154 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003155
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003156- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003157 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003158 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3159 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003160
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003161
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003162What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003163===============================
3164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3166
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003167Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003169
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003170- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3171 with a custom metaclass.
3172
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003173Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003174-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003175
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003176- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3177 are proxies.
3178
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003179Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003181
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003182- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3183 very short strings.
3184
3185- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3186 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3187 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3188 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3189 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3190
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003191Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003193
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003194- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3195 close or delete time).
3196
3197- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3198 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3199
3200- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3201
3202- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003203 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003204
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003205Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003207
3208Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003210
3211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003213
3214New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216
3217Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003219
3220Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003222
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003223- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3224
3225- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3226 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3227
3228- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3229 deleted at process exit time.
3230
3231- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3232 in backslash.
3233
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003234Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003236
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003237- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3238 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3239 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003241
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003242What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003243===========================
3244
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003245*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3246
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003247Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003249
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003250- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3251 been extensively updated. See
3252
3253 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3254
3255 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3256
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003257- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3258 deleted!
3259
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003260- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3261 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3262 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3263 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3264 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3265
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003266- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3267
3268 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3269 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3270
3271 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3272 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3273 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3274 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3275 supported anyway.
3276
3277 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3278 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3279
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003280- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3281 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3282 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3283 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3284 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003285
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003286- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3287 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3288 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3289
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003290Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003292
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003293- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3294 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3295 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3296 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3297 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3298 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003299 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3300 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3301 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3302 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003303
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003304- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3305 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3306 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3307
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003308Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003310
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003311- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3312
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003313Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003315
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003316- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3317 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3318 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3319 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3320 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3321 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3322
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003323- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3324
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003325- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3326
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003327- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3328
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003329- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3330 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3331 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3332
3333- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3334
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003335Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003337
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003338- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3339 off a search on Google.
3340
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003341Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003343
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003344- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3345 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3346 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3347 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3348 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3349 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3350 other platforms should do likewise.
3351
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003352- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3353 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3354 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3355
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003358
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003359- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3360 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3361 producing key-value pairs.
3362
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003363- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003364 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003365 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3366 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3367 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3368 previously went unchallenged.
3369
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003370New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372
3373Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003375
3376Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003378
3379Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003380----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003381
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003382- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3383 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003384
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003385- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3386 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3387 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3388 home.
3389
3390
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003391What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003392===========================
3393
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3395
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003396Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003398
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003399- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3400 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003401
3402 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003403 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003404
3405 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3406 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003407 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003408 This needs to be documented.
3409
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003410- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3411 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3412
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003413- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3414 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3415 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3416
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003417- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3418 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3419
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003420- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3421 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3422 class forbids it).
3423
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003424- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3425 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3426 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3427
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003428- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3429
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003430Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003432
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003433- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3434 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003435 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003436
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003437- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3438 (like 1 + '').
3439
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003440Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003442
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003443- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3444 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3445 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3446 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003447 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003448 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3449
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003450- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3451 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3452 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3453 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3454
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003455- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3456 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003457 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3458 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3459 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003460
3461- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3462 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003463
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003464- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3465 bytes on its input.
3466
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003467Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003469
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003470- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003471 convenience function.
3472
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003473- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3474 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3475 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003476 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3477 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3478 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3479 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3480 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3481 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003482
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003483- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3484 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3485 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3486 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3487
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003488- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3489 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3490 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3491
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003492- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3493 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3494 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3495 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3496
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003497- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3498 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003500 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3501 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3502 new -l and -e options.
3503
3504- statcache is now deprecated.
3505
3506- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3507 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003508 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003509 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3510 time properly taken into account.
3511
3512- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3513 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3514 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3515 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3516
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003517Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003519
3520Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003522
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003523- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3524 is built with libdb3 if available.
3525
3526- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3527
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003530
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003531- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3532 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3533 PySequence_Size().
3534
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003535- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3536
3537- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3538 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3539 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3540
3541- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3542 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3543
3544- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3545 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3546
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003549
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003550- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3551 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3552
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003553- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3554 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3555
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003556- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003560
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003561- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3562 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3563
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003564Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003566
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003567Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003569
3570- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3571 removed completely in the next release.
3572
3573- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3574 OSX.
3575
3576- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3577 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3578
3579- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003581
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003582What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583===========================
3584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3586
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003587Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003589
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003590- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003591 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003592 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003593 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3594 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003595 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3596 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003597 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3598 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003599
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003600- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3601 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3602
3603- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3604 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3605
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003606Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003608
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003609- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3610 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3611 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3612 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3613 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3614 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3615 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3616 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3617
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003618- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3619 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3620 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3621 example).
3622
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003623- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003624 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003625 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003626 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003627
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003628- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3629 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3630 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003631 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003632
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003633- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3634 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3635 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3636 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3637 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3638 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3639
3640 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3641
3642 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3643
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003644Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003646
3647- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3648
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003649- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3650
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003651- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3652 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003653
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003654- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3655 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3656 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3657 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3658 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3659 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003660 attributes.
3661
3662- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3663 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3664 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003665
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003666- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3667 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3668 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003669
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003670- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3671 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3672 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003673 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3674 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3675
3676- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3677 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003678
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003681
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003682- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3683 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3684
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003685- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3686 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3687 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3688 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3689
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003690- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3691 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3692 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3693 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3694
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003695 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3696 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3697 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3698 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3699 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3700 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3701 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3702 without losing information).
3703
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003704- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003705 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3706 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3707 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3708 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3709 module).
3710
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003711 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003712 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3713 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3714 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3715 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003716
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003717- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003718 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3719 encoding.
3720
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003721- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3722 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3723
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003725 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3726
3727- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3728 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3729 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3730 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3731
3732- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3733
3734- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3735 ON, and OFF.
3736
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003737- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3738 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3739
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003740Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003742
3743- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3744 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3745 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003746
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003747- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3748 been added: -X and -E.
3749
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003750Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003752
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003753- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3754 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3755
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003758
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003759- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3760 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3761 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3762 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3763 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3764
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003765- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3766 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3767 as long) arguments.
3768
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003769- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3770 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3771 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3772 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3773 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3774 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3775
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003776- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3777 input.
3778
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003779New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781
3782Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003784
3785Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003787
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003788- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3789 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3790 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3791
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003792- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3793 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3794 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003795 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3798 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3799 import signal
3800 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003801
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003803 while 1:
3804 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003806 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3807 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3808 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3809 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003810
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003811
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003812What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3813===========================
3814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3816
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003819
3820- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3821 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3822 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3823
3824- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3825 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3826 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3827 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3828 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3829 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3830 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003831
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003832- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003833 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003834 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3835 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3836 associate a docstring with a property.
3837
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003838- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3839 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3840 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3841 other built-in object types.
3842
3843- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3844 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3845 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3846 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3847 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3848
3849- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3850 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3851
3852- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3853 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003854 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003855 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3856 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3857 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3858 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3859 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3860
3861- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3862 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3863 class.
3864
3865- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3866 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3867 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3868 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3869
3870- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3871 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3872 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3873 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3874
3875- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3876 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3877
3878- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3879 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3880 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3881 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3882 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003883 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003884 with the same value as s.
3885
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003886- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3887
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003888Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003890
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003891- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3892
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003893- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3894 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3895 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3896 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3897 objects.
3898
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003899- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3900 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003901 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3902 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3903
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003904- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3905 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3906 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3907
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003908Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003910
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003911- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3912 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3913 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3914 by the instances.
3915
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003916- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3917 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3918 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3919
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003920- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3921 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3922 before the entire comparison is complete.
3923
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003924- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3925 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3926 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3927
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003928- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3929 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3930 getwriter().
3931
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003932- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3933 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3934
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003935- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003936 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3937 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3938
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003939- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3940 iterable object.
3941
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003942- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3943 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003944
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003945- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3946 authentication.
3947
3948- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3949 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003950
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003951- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003952 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3953 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3954 a sample driver.)
3955
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003956Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003958
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003959- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3960 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3961 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3962 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3963 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3964 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3965 kernel has large file support.
3966
3967- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3968 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3969 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3970 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3971 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3972
3973- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3974 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3975 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3976
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003977C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003979
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003980- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3981 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3982
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003985
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003986- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3987 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3988
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003989Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003991
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003992- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3993 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3994 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3995 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3996 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3997
3998- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3999 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4000 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4001 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4002
4003- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4004 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4005
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004006Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004008
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004009- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004010 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4011 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004012
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004013
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004014What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4015===========================
4016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4018
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004019Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004021
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004022- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4023 big to represent as a C double.
4024
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004025- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4026 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4027 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4028 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4029 restriction).
4030
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004031- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4032 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4033 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4034 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4035 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4036
4037 >>> dir([])
4038 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4039 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4040 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4041 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4042 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4043 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4044 'reverse', 'sort']
4045
4046 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4047
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004048- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004049 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4050 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4051 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4052 OverflowError exception.
4053
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004054- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004055 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004056 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4057 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4058 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4059 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4060 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004061 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4063 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4064
4065 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4066 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4067 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4068 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004069
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004070- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004071 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4072 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4073 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4074 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4075 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4076 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4077 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4078 once it is created.
4079
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004080- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4081 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4082 (key, value) pairs.
4083
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004084- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004085 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4086 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4087
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004088- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4089 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4090 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4091 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4092 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004093
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004094- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004095 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4096 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4097
4098 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4099
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004100- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004101 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4102
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004105
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004106- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004107 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4108 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004109
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004110- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4111 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4112 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4113 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4114 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4115 in this area anymore).
4116
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004117- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4118 threading.Timer.
4119
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004120- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4121 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4122
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004123- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004124 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4125
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004126- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004127 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4128 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4129 converted to Python longs.
4130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004131- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004132 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4133
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004134- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4135 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4136 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4137
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004138Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004140
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004141- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4142 division operators as per PEP 238.
4143
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004144Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004146
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004147- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4148 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4149 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4150 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4151
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004152C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004154
4155- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004156
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004157- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4158 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004159 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4162 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004163 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004165
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004166- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004167 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4168 module:
4169
4170 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004171
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004172 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4173 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004174
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004175 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4176 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004177
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004178 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4179
4180 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4181
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004182- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004183 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4184 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4185 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004186
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004187New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004189
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004190- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4191 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4192 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4193 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4194 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004195
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004196Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004198
4199Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004201
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004202- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4203 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4204 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4205 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004206 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4207 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4208 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4209 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4210 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004211
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004212- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004213 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4214
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004215
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004216What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4217===========================
4218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4220
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004221Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004223
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004224- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4225 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4226
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004227- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4228 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4229 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004230
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004231- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4232 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4233 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4234 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004235
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004236- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004239
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004240Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004242
4243- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004244 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004245 the module docstring for details.
4246
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004247Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004249
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004250- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004251 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4252 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4253 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004254
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004255- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4256 Nick Mathewson.
4257
4258Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004260
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004261- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4262 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4263 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4264 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4265 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4266 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4267 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4268 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4269
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004270- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4271 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4272 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4273 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4274
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004275- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4276 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4277 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4278 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4279 come a long way).
4280
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004281- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4282 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4283 write filters for these warnings).
4284
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004285- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4286 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4287 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4288 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4289 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4290
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004291- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4292 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4293 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4294 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4295 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4296 older distribution.
4297
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004298Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004300
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004301- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4302 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004303 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004304
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004305- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4306 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4307 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4308
4309- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4310
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004311- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4312
4313- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4314
4315- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004318
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004319- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4320
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004321New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004323
4324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004326
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004327- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4328 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4329 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4330 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4331 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4332 against buffer overruns.
4333
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004334- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004335 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4336 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004337 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4338 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4339 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4340
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004341- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4342 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4343 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4344 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4345 deprecated.
4346
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004349
4350- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4351 relevant is found.
4352
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004353
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004354What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004355===========================
4356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4358
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004359Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004361
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004362- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4363 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4364 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4365 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4366 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4367 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4368 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4369 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004370 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004371 repaired.
4372
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004373- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004374 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004375 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4376 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4377 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4378 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4379 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4380 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4381 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4382 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4383
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004384- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4385 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4386 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4387 leading BMO character).
4388
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004389- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4390 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4391 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4392
4393 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4394 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4395 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004396
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004397 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4398 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4399 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4400 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4401 for various simple to use conversions.
4402
4403 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4404 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4405
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4407 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4408 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4409 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4410 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4411 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4412 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4413 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4415 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4416 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4417 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4418 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4419 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4420 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004421
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004422- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4423 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4424 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004425 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004426 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004427
4428 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004429 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4430 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4431 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4432 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4433 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004434 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4435 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004436
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004437 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4438 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4439 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004440 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004441
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004442- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4443 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4444 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4445 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4446 floating arithmetic,
4447
4448 x = 9007199254740992.0
4449 print long(x)
4450
4451 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4452 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4453 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4454 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4455 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4456 functions are of good quality).
4457
4458 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4459 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4460 algorithms to break.
4461
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004462- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4463 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4464 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4465 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4466 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4467 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4468 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4469 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4470 order.
4471
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004472- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4473 operation along the most common code paths.
4474
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004475- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4476 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4477
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004478- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4479 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4480 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4481 {}.update(UserDict())
4482
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004483- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4484 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4485 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4486 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4487 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4488 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4489 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4490 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4491
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004492- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004493 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004495 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004496 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4497 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004498 join() method of strings
4499 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004500 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4501 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004503 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004504
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004505- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4506 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4507
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004508- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4509 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4510
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004511- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4512 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4513 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4514 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4515
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004516- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4517 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004518 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004519 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4520 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004521
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004522- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4523
4524
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004525Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004527
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004528- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004529 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004530 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4531 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4532
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004533- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4534 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4535
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004536- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4537 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4538 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4539 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4540
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004541- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4542 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4543 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4544
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004545- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4546
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004547- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4548
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004549- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4550 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4551 that are still imported into string.py).
4552
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004553- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4554
4555- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4556 Now it does.
4557
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004558- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4559
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004560- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4561 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4562 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4563 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4564 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004565 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4566 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004567
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004568- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4569 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4570 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4571 'help(object)'.
4572
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004573Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004575
4576- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004577 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004578 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4579 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4580
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004581- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004582 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4583 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004584
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004585C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004587
4588- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4589 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590
4591----
4592
4593**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**