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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000015- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
16 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
17 character other than a space.
18
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000019- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
20 by the function object or by the method object, the function
21 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
22 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
23 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
24 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
25 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
26 attributes with the same name.
27
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000028- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
29 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
30 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
31 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
32 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
33 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
34 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
35 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
36 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
37 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
38 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
39 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
40 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
41 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000042
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000043- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
44 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
45 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
46 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
47 This has been repaired.
48
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000049- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
50
51- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
52
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000053- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
54 over a sequence.
55
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000056- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
57
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000058- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
59 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
60 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
61 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
62 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
63 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
64 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
65 records with equal keys is unchanged).
66
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000067- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
68 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000069
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000070- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
71 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
72 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
73
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000074- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
75 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
76 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
77 freelist.
78
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000079- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
80 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
81
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000082- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
83 number.
84
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000085- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
86 a TypeError exception.
87
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000088- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
89 820195.
90
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000091- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
92 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
93 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
94
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000095Extension modules
96-----------------
97
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +000098- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
99
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000100- os.getsid was added.
101
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000102- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
103 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
104 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
105
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000106- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
107
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000108- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
109
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000110- readline.clear_history was added.
111
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000112- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
113
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000114- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
115
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000116- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
117
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000118- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
119
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000120- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
121
122- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
123
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000124- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
125
126- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
127
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000128- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
129 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
130 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
131
132- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
133 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
134 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
135 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
136 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
137 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
138 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
139
140- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
141 iterators from a single iterable.
142
143- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
144 of raising a TypeError exception.
145
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000146Library
147-------
148
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000149- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
150 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
151
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000152- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
153
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000154- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
155
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000156- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
157
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000158- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
159 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
160
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000161- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
162
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000163- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
164 a string).
165
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000166- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
167
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000168- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
169
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000170- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
171
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000172- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
173
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000174- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
175 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
176 list of fieldnames.
177
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000178- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
179 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
180
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000181- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
182
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000183- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
184 empty lists.
185
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000186- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
187 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
188 and shelves.
189
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000190- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
191 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
192
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000193- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000194 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
195 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000196
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000197- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
198 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000199 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000200
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000201- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000202 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
203 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
204
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000205- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
206 and removed in Py2.4.
207
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000208- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000210Tools/Demos
211-----------
212
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000213- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
214
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000215- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
216 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
217 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
218 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
219
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000220- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
221
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000222- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
223 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
224 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
225 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
226 now.
227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
229 in effect
230
231- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
232 C-c C-h
233
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000234- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
235 -d option was given.
236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000237Build
238-----
239
240C API
241-----
242
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000243- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
244 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
245 about 10% faster.
246
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000247- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
248 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
249
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000250- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
251 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
252 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
253 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
254
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000255New platforms
256-------------
257
258Tests
259-----
260
261Windows
262-------
263
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000264- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
265 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
266 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
267
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000268Mac
269----
270
271
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000272What's New in Python 2.3 final?
273===============================
274
275*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
276
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000277IDLE
278----
279
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000280- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
281 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
282 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
283 context-menu actions.
284
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000285- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
286 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
287 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
288 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
289 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
290 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
291 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
292 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
293 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
294
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000295
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000296What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
297=============================================
298
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000299*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000300
301Core and builtins
302-----------------
303
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000304- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000305 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000306 comment at the end are still unsupported.
307
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000308Extension modules
309-----------------
310
311- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
312 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
313 than once. This has been fixed.
314
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000315- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
316 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
317 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
318 call.
319
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000320- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
321
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000322Library
323-------
324
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000325- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
326 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
327
328- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
329 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
330 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
331 restored.
332
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000333IDLE
334----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000335
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000336- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000337
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000338Build
339-----
340
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000341- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
342 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
343
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000344C API
345-----
346
347Windows
348-------
349
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000350- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
351 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
352
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000353- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
354
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000355Mac
356---
357
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000358- Various fixes to pimp.
359
360- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
361
362- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
363 more problems than it solves.
364
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000365
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000366What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
367=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000368
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000369*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
370
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000371Core and builtins
372-----------------
373
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000374- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
375 by sys.setcheckinterval().
376
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000377- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
378 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000379 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000380
381- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
382 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
383 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000384 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000385
386- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
387 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000388
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000389- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
390 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
391 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
392
393- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000394 770247.
395
396- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000397
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000398Extension modules
399-----------------
400
401- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
402 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
403
404- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
405
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000406- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
407
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000408- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
409 contained within the _strptime module.
410
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000411- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
412 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
413
414- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000415 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
416
417- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
418 the find_class attribute, if present.
419
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000420- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000421
422 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
423 (SF bug 763298).
424
425 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000426 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
427 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
428 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000429
430 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000432Library
433-------
434
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000435- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
436
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000437- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
438 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
439 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
440 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
441 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
442 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
443 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
444 or Tester().
445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000446- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
447 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
448 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
449 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
450 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
451 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
452 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
453 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
454 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000455
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000456 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000457
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000458- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
459 weren't before was an oversight.
460
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000461- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
462 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
463
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000464- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
465 when there are no lines.
466
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000467- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
468 which could occur with Tk 8.4
469
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000470- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
471 to child processes.
472
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000473- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
474
475- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
476
477- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
478 xmlrpclib.
479
480- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
481 responses.
482
483- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
484 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
485
486- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
487 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
488 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
489
490- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
491 used as patterns.
492
493- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
494 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
495 than Tk 8.3.
496
497- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
498
499- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000500
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000501Tools/Demos
502-----------
503
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000504- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
505
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000506- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
507
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000508- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000509
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000510Build
511-----
512
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000513- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
514
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000515- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000517- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
518 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000519
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000520- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
521 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
522 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000523
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000524C API
525-----
526
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000527- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
528 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
529
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000530Windows
531-------
532
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000533- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
534 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
535 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
536 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
537 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
538 Python exception ::
539
540 thread.error: can't start new thread
541
542 is raised now.
543
544- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
545 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
546 instead of from DLL teardown.
547
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000548Mac
549---
550
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000551- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000552 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000553 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
554 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
555 the executable in the bundle.
556
557- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000558
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000559- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
560
561- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
562 on Panther.
563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000564What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
565================================
566
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000567*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000568
569Core and builtins
570-----------------
571
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000572- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
573 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
574 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
575 with the -i option.
576
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000577- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
578 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
579
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000580- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
581 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
582
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000583- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
584 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
585 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
586 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
587 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
588 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
589 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
590 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
591 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
592 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
593 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
594 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
595 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000597- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
598 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
599 embedded in a lambda expression.
600
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000601- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
602 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
603 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
604 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
605 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
606
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000607- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
608 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
609 matches the restriction on classic classes.
610
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000611- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
612 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
613
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000614- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
615 It's writable again.
616
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000617- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
618 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
619 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000620 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000622- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
623 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
624 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000626Extension modules
627-----------------
628
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000629- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
630 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
631
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000632- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
633 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
634 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
635 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
636
637- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
638 collection.
639
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000640- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
641 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
642 unique within a single program run.
643
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000644- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
645 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
646
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000647- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
648 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
649
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000650- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
651 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000652
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000653- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
654
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000655- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
656 Fixes SF bug #730685.
657
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000658- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
659 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
660 for many BSD-derived systems.
661
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000662
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000663Library
664-------
665
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000666- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
667 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
668 primary ones:
669
670 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
671 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
672 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
673
674 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
675 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
676 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
677 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
678 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
679 framework features (which doctest lacks).
680
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000681- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
682 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
683 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
684 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
685 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
686 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
687 argument.
688
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000689- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
690 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
691 in the archive.
692
693- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
694 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
695
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000696- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
697 569574).
698
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000699- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
700 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
701 no more.
702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000703- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
704 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
705 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
706 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
707 code coverage.
708
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000709- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
710 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
711 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000712 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
713 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000714
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000715- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
716 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
717 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000718 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000719
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000720- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
721
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000722- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
723 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
724 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
725 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
726
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000727- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
728 handling.
729
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000730- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
731 __doc__ of data descriptors.
732
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000733- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
734 in socket.py.
735
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000736- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
737
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000738- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
739 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
740 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
741 opener with proxy support.
742
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000743- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
744
745- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
746
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000747Tools/Demos
748-----------
749
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000750- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
751
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000752- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
753
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000754- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
755 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000756
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000757- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
758 files.
759
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000760Build
761-----
762
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000763- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000764 different root directory.
765
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000766C API
767-----
768
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000769- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
770 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
771 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
772 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
773 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
774 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
775 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
776 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
777 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
778 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
779
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000780- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
781 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
782 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
783 from Python.
784
785
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000786New platforms
787-------------
788
789None this time.
790
791Tests
792-----
793
794- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
795 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
796
797Windows
798-------
799
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000800- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
801
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000802- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
803 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
804 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
805 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
806 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
807 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
808 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
809 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
810 that's what it's for.
811
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000812Mac
813---
814
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000815- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
816 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
817 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
818 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000819- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
820 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
821- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000822
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000823SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
824------------------------------------
825
826430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
827598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
828622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
829661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
830683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
831697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
832713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
833724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
834727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
835729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
836730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
837731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
838732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
839733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
840735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
841740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
842744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
843745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
844747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
845749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
846751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
847753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
848755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
849757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
850760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
851
852
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000853What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
854================================
855
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000856*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000857
858Core and builtins
859-----------------
860
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000861- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
862 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
863
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000864- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
865 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
866 and cannot be strings).
867
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000868- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
869 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
870 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
871 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
872
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000873- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
874 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
875 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
876 Python itself.
877
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000878- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
879 the referenced object, if it has one.
880
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000881- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
882 the thread started at
883 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
884
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000885- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
886 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
887 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
888 placed on a list index.
889
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000890- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
891 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
892 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
893 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
894
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000895- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
896 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
897 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
898 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
899 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
900 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
901 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
902
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000903- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
904 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
905 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
906 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
907 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
908
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000909- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
910 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000911
912- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
913 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
914 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
915 #693195.)
916
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000917- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
918 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000919
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000920- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000921 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000922 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
923 interpreter executions, would fail.
924
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000925- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000926 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000927 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000928
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000929Extension modules
930-----------------
931
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000932- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
933 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
934 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
935 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
936
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000937- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
938 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
939
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000940- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
941 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
942 and Greg Chapman.)
943
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000944- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
945 recursively.
946
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000947- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000948 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
949 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
950 leaks.
951
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000952- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
953
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000954- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
955 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
956 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
957 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
958 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
959 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
960 #705836.
961
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000962- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000963 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
964
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000965- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
966 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
967 See SF bug #692416.
968
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000969- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
970 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
971
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000972- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
973 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
974 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000975
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000976- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000977 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
978 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
979
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000980- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
981 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
982 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
983 timeouts to work properly.
984
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000985Library
986-------
987
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000988- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
989 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
990 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
991 future release.
992
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000993- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
994 for querying platform dependent features.
995
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000996- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000997
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000998- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
999 pickle protocol versions.
1000
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001001- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1002 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1003 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1004
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001005- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1006
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001007- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1008 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1009 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1010 modules.
1011
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001012- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1013 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1014 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1015
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001016- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1017 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1018
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001019- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1020 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1021 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1022
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001023- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001024 MS Office extensions.
1025
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001026- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1027 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1028
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001029- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1030 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1031
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001032- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1033 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1034 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1035 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1036 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1037 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1038
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001039- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1040 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1041 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001042
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001043- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1044 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1045 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1046
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001047- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1048
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001049- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1050 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1051 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1052
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001053Tools/Demos
1054-----------
1055
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001056- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1057 See the module docstring for details.
1058
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001059Build
1060-----
1061
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001062- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1063 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001064
1065C API
1066-----
1067
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001068- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1069
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001070- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1071 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1072 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1073
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001074- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1075 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001076
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001077 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1078 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1079 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001080
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001081- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001082 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1083
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001084- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1085 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1086 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001087
1088New platforms
1089-------------
1090
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001091None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001092
1093Tests
1094-----
1095
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001096- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1097 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001098
1099Windows
1100-------
1101
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001102- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1103 function.
1104
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001105- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1106 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001107
1108Mac
1109---
1110
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001111- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1112 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001113
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001114- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1115 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001116
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001117- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1118 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1119 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001120
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001121- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001122 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1123 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001124
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001125- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1126 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001127
1128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001129What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1130=================================
1131
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001132*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001133
1134Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001135-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001136
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001137- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1138 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1139 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1140
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001141- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1142 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1143 (SF patch #664376.)
1144
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001145- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1146 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1147 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1148 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1149 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1150 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001151 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001152
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001153- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1154 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1155 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1156 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001157 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001158
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001159- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1160 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1161 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1162 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1163 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1164 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1165 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1166 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1167 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1168 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1169 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1170
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001171- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1172 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1173 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1174 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1175 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1176 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1177
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001178- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1179 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1180
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001181- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1182 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1183 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1184 case.)
1185
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001186- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1187 passed as unicode strings.
1188
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001189- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1190 See SF bug #683467.
1191
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001192- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1193 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1194
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001195- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1196
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001197- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1198
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001199- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1200 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1201 arguments.
1202
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001203- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1204 See SF bug #667147.
1205
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001206- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001207 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001208 See SF bug #676155.
1209
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001210- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001211 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001212 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1213 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1214 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1215 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1216 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1217 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001219Extension modules
1220-----------------
1221
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001222- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1223 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1224 tp_as_number pointer.
1225
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001226- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1227 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1228 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1229 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1230 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1231
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001232- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1233
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001234- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1235
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001236- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001237 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001238 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1239 patch #678531.)
1240
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001241- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1242 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1243
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001244- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1245 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1246
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001247- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1248
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001249- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1250 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1251 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1252
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001253- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1254
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001255- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1256 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1257
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001258- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001259
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001260- datetime changes:
1261
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001262 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1263
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001264 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1265 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1266 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1267 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1268 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1269 now.
1270
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001271 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001272 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1273 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001274
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001275 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001276 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001277 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1278 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1279 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1280 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001281
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001282 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1283 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1284 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001285 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1286
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001287 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1288 by a later example coded by Guido.
1289
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001290 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001291 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1292 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1293 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001294 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1295 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1296
1297 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1298 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1299 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1300 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1301 tzinfo subclass instance.
1302
1303 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1304 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1305 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1306 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1307 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1308 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1309 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1310 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001311
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001312 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1313 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1314 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1315 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1316 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001317 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1318
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001319 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001320
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001321 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1322 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1323 as a naive datetime object.
1324
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001325 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1326 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1327 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1328
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001329 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1330 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1331 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1332 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1333 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1334 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1335 comparison.
1336
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001337 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1338 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1339 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1340 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001341 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001342
1343 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001344
1345 and ::
1346
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001347 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1348
1349 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1350 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1351 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1352 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1353
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001354 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1355 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1356 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1357 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1358 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1359
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001360 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1361 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001362 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1363 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001364
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001365Library
1366-------
1367
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001368- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1369 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1370
1371- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1372 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1373 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1374 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1375 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1376 See PEP 307 for details.
1377
1378- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1379 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1380
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001381- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1382 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001383 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001384 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1385 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001386 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001387
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001388- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1389 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1390
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001391- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1392 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1393 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1394
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001395- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1396
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001397- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1398 exception.
1399
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001400- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1401 class.
1402
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001403- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1404 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1405 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1406
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001407- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1408 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1409
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001410- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001411 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1412 See SF bug #659228.
1413
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001414- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1415 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1416 See SF patch #651082.
1417
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001418- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001419
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001420- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1421 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1422
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001423- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001424 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001425
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001426- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1427 DOS paths from other platforms.
1428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001429Tools/Demos
1430-----------
1431
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001432- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1433 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1434 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1435 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1436 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1437 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1438 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1439 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1440 example:
1441
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001442 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1443 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001444
1445 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1446
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001447
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001448Build
1449-----
1450
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001451- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1452 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1453 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001454 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1455
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001456 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1457
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001458- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1459 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1460 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1461 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1462 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1463 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1464 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1465 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1466 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1467
1468- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1469 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1470 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1471 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1472
1473- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1474 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1475
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001476C API
1477-----
1478
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001479- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1480 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001481
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001482- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1483 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1484 tp_as_number pointer.
1485
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001486- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1487 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1488 (SF #681367)
1489
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001490- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1491 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1492 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1493 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001494
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001495Tests
1496-----
1497
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001498- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001499 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1500 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1501 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1502 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1503 pydoc.)
1504
1505- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1506
1507- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001509Windows
1510-------
1511
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001512- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1513 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1514 time).
1515
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001516- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1517 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1518
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001519- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1520 release without strong cryptography.
1521
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001522- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001523 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001524
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001525- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1526 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1527
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001528Mac
1529---
1530
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001531- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1532 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001533
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001534- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1535 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1536 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001537
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001538- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1539 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001540
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001541- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1542 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1543 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1544 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001545
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001546- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001547 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1548 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1549 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001550
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001551
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001552What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001553=================================
1554
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001555*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001557Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001558--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001559
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001560- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1561
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001562- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1563 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001564 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001565 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001566 a different meaning than before.
1567
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001568- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001569 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001570 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001571
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001572- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001573 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001574 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001575
1576- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1577 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1578 and deallocation.
1579
1580- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1581 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1582
1583- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1584 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1585 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1586 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1587 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1588
1589- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1590 now detected by the garbage collector.
1591
1592- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1593 [SF bug 519621]
1594
1595- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1596 identifier.
1597
1598- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1599 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1600 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1601 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1602 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1603 [SF bug 563060]
1604
1605- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1606 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1607 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1608 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1609 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1610
1611- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1612 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1613 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1614
1615- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1616
1617- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1618 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1619 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1620 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1621 state of the slots would be lost.)
1622
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001623Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001624-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001625
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001626- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001627 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1628 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1629 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1630 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001631 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1632 Jython 2.1.
1633
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001634- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001635 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001636 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1637 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1638 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1639 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1640 these, see PEP 302.
1641
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001642- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1643 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1644 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1645
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001646- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1647 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1648 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1649
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001650- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1651 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1652 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1653
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001654- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1655 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1656 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1657 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1658 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1659 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1660 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1661 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1662 releases or implementations.
1663
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001664- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001665 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1666 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001667
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001668- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1669 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1670
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001671- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1672 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1673 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1674
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001675- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1676 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1677
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001678- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1679 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001680 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1681 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001682
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001683- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1684 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1685 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1686 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1687 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1688
1689 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1690 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1691 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1692 pattern.
1693
1694 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1695 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1696 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1697 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1698
1699 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1700 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1701 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1702 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1703 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1704 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1705
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001706- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1707 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1708 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1709 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1710 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1711 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1712 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1713 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001714
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001715- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1716 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1717 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1718 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1719 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001720 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1721 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1722 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1723 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1724 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1725 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1726 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001727
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001728- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1729 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1730
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001731- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1732 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1733 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1734 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1735 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1736 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1737 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1738 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1739 to Zack Weinberg!
1740
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001741- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1742 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1743 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1744 type. This has been fixed now.
1745
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001746- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1747 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1748 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1749
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001750- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1751 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1752 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1753 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1754 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1755 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1756 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1757 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001758 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001759
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001760- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1761 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1762 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001763
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001764- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1765 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1766 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1767 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1768 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1769 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1770 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1771 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001772 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001773 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1774 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1775
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001776- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1777 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1778 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1779 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1780 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1781 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1782 this.)
1783
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001784- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1785 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001786 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001787 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001788 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1789 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001790 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1791 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001792
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001793- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1794 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1795 currently running.
1796
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001797- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1798 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1799 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1800 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1801
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001802- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1803 as directory names.
1804
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001805- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1806 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1807
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001808- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1809 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1810
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001811- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001812 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1813 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001814
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001815- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1816 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1817 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1818 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1819 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1820
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001821- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1822 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1823 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1824 removed.
1825
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001826- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1827 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1828 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1829
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001830- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1831 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1832 to __debug__.
1833
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001834- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1835 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1836 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1837
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001838- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1839 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1840 deprecated now.
1841
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001842- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1843 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1844 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001845
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001846- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1847 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1848 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1849 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1850 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001851
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001852- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1853 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1854
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001855- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1856 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1857 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001858 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001859 is backward compatible.
1860
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001861- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1862 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1863 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1864 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1865 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1866
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001867- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1868 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1869 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1870 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1871 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1872 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001873
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001874- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1875 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1876
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001877- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1878 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1879
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001880- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1881 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1882 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1883 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1884 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1885
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001886- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1887 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1888 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1889
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001890- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001891 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1892
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001893- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1894 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1895 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001896
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001897- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1898 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1899
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001900- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1901 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1902 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1903
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001904- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001906Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001908
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001909- Added three operators to the operator module:
1910 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1911 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1912 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1913
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001914- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1915
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001916- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1917 archives.
1918
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001919- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1920 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1921 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1922
1923 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1924
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001925- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1926 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1927 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001928 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001929
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001930- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1931 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1932 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1933 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001934 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1935 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1936 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1937 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001938
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001939- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1940 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001941
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001942- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1943
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001944- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1945 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1946
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001947- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1948 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1949 supported.
1950
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001951- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1952
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001953- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1954 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001955
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001956- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1957 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1958
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001959- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1960
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001961- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1962 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1963
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001964- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1965 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1966 functions but callable type objects.
1967
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001968- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001969 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001970 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001971
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001972- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1973 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001974
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001975- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1976 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001977
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001978- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1979 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1980 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1981 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1982
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001983- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1984 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001985
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001986- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1987 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1988 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1989 and __imul__.
1990
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001991- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001992 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1993 is called.
1994
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001995- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1996 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1997 interpreter was compiled.
1998
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001999- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2000 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2001 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002002 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002003 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2004 1, not 2.
2005
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002006- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2007 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2008 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2009 limit.
2010
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002011- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2012 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2013 bug #623464.
2014
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002015- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2016 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2017 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2018 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2019
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002020Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002021-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002022
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002023- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2024
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002025- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2026 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2027 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2028 with Python 2.3a2.
2029
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002030- os.path exposes getctime.
2031
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002032- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002033 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002034 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002035 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002036 unit tests of floating point results.
2037
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002038- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2039 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2040 has been increased.
2041
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002042- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2043 executed.
2044
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002045- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2046 postinstallation script.
2047
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002048- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2049 test the current module.
2050
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002051- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002052 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2053 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2054 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2055 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2056
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002057- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002058 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002059 Ward's Optik package.
2060
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002061- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2062 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2063 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2064 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2065
2066- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2067 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002068 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002069
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002070- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2071 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2072 shelf are binary pickles.
2073
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002074- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2075 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2076
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002077- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2078 modules are iterators now.
2079
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002080- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2081 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2082 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2083 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2084 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2085 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002086
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002087- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2088 with their entity value.
2089
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002090- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2091
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002092- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2093 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002094
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002095- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2096 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002097 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002098
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002099- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2100 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2101 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2102 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2103 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2104 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2105 main():
2106
2107 import locale
2108 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2109
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002110- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2111 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2112
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002113- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2114 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2115 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2116 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2117 to the new standard.
2118
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002119- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2120 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2121 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2122 an extension to the database.
2123
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002124- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2125 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2126 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2127 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002128 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002129
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002130- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002131 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002132
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002133- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2134 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2135 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2136 bounded integers.
2137
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002138- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2139 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2140 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2141 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2142 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2143 in existence.
2144
2145 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2146 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2147 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2148 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2149 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2150 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2151
2152 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2153 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2154 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2155 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2156
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002157- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2158 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2159 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2160
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002161- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2162
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002163- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2164 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2165 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2166 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2167
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002168- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2169 argument.
2170
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002171- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2172 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2173 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2174 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2175 [SF patch 560794].
2176
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002177- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2178 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2179 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002180 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2181 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2182 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002183
2184- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2185 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002186
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002187- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2188 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2189 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2190 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002191
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002192- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2193 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2194 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2195 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2196 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2197
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002198- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002199
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002200- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2201
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002202- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2203 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2204 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2205 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2206 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2207 identical to None.
2208
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002209- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2210 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2211 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2212 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2213 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2214 results now.
2215
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002216- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2217 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2218
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002219- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2220 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2221 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2222 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2223 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2224 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2225 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2226 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2227
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002228- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2229
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002230- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2231 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2232
2233- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2234 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2235 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2236 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2237 and other systems.
2238
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002239- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2240 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2241 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2242 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 +00002243 work well with these.
2244
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002245- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2246
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002247- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002248 connections.
2249
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002250- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2251 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2252 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2253
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002254- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2255 sets
2256
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002257- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2258 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2259 name.
2260
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002261- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2262 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2263 passed in.
2264
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002265- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002266 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002267 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2268 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002269
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002270- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2271
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002272- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2273
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002274- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2275 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2276 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2277
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002278- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2279 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2280 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2281 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002282 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002283
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002284- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002285 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002286 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002287
2288- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2289 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2290 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2291
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002292- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002293 the value of its expression argument.
2294
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002295- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2296 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2297 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2298
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002299- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2300 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2301 skipstone browser was included.
2302
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002303- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2304 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002306Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002308
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002309- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2310 names in addition to accepting file names.
2311
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002312- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2313 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2314 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2315 still used and useful.)
2316
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002317- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2318 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2319 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2320 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002321
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002322- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2323 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2324 the generated binary.
2325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002326Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002328
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002329- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2330
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002331- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2332 except in the hands of experts.
2333
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002334- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002335 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2336 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2337 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002338
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002339- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2340 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2341 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2342 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2343 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2344 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2345 builds.
2346
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002347- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2348 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2349 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2350 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2351 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2352 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2353 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2354 new type.
2355
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002356- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002357
2358 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2359 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2360 positive infinities.
2361
2362 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2363 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2364 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2365 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2366 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2367 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2368 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2369
2370 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2371
2372 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2373
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002374- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2375 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2376 size of the executable.
2377
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002378- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2379 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2380 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2381 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002382
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002383- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2384
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002385- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2386 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2387 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002388
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002389- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2390 well as Unix.
2391
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002392- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2393 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2394 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2395 modules in the README file for details.
2396
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002397C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002399
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002400- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2401 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002402 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002403 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002404 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002405
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002406- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2407 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2408 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2409 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2410 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2411 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002412 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002413 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2414 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2415 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2416 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2417 aligned.)
2418
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002419- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2420 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2421 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2422
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002423- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2424 level.
2425
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002426- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2427 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2428 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2429 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2430 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2431
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002432- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2433 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2434 code.
2435
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002436- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2437 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2438 adjusting for negative indices.
2439
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002440- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2441 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2442 object.
2443
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002444- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2445 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2446 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2447
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002448- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2449 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002450
2451- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2452
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002453- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2454 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2455 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2456 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2457
2458- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2459
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002460- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002461
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002462- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002463 without going through the buffer API.
2464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002465- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002466
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002467- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2468 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2469 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2470 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2471
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002472- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2473 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2474
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002475- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002476 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2477
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002478New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002479-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002480
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002481- OpenVMS is now supported.
2482
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002483- AtheOS is now supported.
2484
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002485- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2486
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002487- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2488
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002489Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002490-----
2491
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002492- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2493 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2494 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002495
2496Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002497-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002498
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002499- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2500 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2501 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2502 bugs.
2503 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002504 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002505 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2506 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002507 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002508
2509- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002510 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002511
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002512- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2513 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2514
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002515- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2516 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002517 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002518 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2519
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002520- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2521 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2522 use files" uninstall option).
2523
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002524- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2525
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002526- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2527 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2528
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002529- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2530 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2531 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2532
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002533- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2534 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2535 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2536 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2537 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002538 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2539 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2540 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002541
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002542- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002543 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002544 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2545 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2546 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2547 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2548 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2549 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2550 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2551 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2552 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2553 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2554 work around.
2555
2556- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2557 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2558 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2559 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2560 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2561 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2562 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2563 specified with O_CREAT too).
2564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002565Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002566----
2567
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002568- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002569
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002570- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2571 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2572 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2573
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002574- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2575 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2576 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2577
2578- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2579 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2580 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2581 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2582 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2583 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2584 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2585 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002586
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002587- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2588 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2589 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002591- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2592 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2593 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2594 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2595 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002596
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002597- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2598 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2599 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002600
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002601- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2602 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002603
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002604- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2605 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2606 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2607 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2608 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002609
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002610- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2611 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2612 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2613
2614- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2615 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2616 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002617
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002618- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2619 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2620 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2621 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002622 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002623
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002624- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2625 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002626
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002627- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2628 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002629
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002630- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002631 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002632 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2633 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002634
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002635
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002636What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002637===============================
2638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2640
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002641Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002642--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002643
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002644- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2645 with a custom metaclass.
2646
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002647Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002649
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002650- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2651 are proxies.
2652
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002653Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002654-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002655
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002656- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2657 very short strings.
2658
2659- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2660 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2661 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2662 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2663 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2664
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002666-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002667
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002668- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2669 close or delete time).
2670
2671- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2672 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2673
2674- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2675
2676- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002677 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002679Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002681
2682Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002683-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002684
2685C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002687
2688New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002689-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002690
2691Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002692-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002693
2694Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002695-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002696
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002697- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2698
2699- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2700 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2701
2702- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2703 deleted at process exit time.
2704
2705- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2706 in backslash.
2707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002708Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002709----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002711- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2712 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2713 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2714
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002715
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002716What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002717===========================
2718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002719*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2720
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002721Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002722--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002723
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002724- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2725 been extensively updated. See
2726
2727 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2728
2729 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2730
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002731- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2732 deleted!
2733
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002734- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2735 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2736 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2737 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2738 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2739
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002740- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2741
2742 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2743 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2744
2745 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2746 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2747 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2748 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2749 supported anyway.
2750
2751 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2752 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2753
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002754- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2755 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2756 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2757 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2758 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002759
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002760- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2761 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2762 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2763
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002764Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002766
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002767- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2768 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2769 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2770 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2771 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2772 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002773 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2774 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2775 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2776 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002777
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002778- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2779 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2780 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2781
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002782Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002784
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002785- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2786
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002787Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002788-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002789
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002790- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2791 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2792 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2793 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2794 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2795 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2796
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002797- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2798
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002799- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2800
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002801- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2802
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002803- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2804 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2805 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2806
2807- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2808
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002809Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002810-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002811
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002812- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2813 off a search on Google.
2814
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002815Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002817
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002818- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2819 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2820 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2821 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2822 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2823 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2824 other platforms should do likewise.
2825
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002826- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2827 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2828 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2829
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002832
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002833- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2834 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2835 producing key-value pairs.
2836
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002837- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002838 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002839 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2840 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2841 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2842 previously went unchallenged.
2843
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002844New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002846
2847Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002849
2850Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002851-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002852
2853Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002855
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002856- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2857 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002858
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002859- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2860 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2861 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2862 home.
2863
2864
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002865What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002866===========================
2867
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2869
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002870Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002871--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002872
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002873- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2874 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002875
2876 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002877 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002878
2879 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2880 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002881 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002882 This needs to be documented.
2883
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002884- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2885 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2886
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002887- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2888 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2889 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2890
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002891- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2892 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2893
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002894- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2895 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2896 class forbids it).
2897
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002898- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2899 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2900 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2901
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002902- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002904Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002905-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002906
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002907- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2908 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002909 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002910
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002911- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2912 (like 1 + '').
2913
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002914Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002915-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002916
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002917- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2918 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2919 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2920 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002921 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002922 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2923
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002924- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2925 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2926 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2927 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2928
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002929- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2930 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002931 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2932 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2933 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002934
2935- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2936 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002937
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002938- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2939 bytes on its input.
2940
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002941Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002943
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002944- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002945 convenience function.
2946
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002947- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2948 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2949 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002950 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2951 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2952 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2953 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2954 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2955 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002956
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002957- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2958 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2959 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2960 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2961
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002962- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2963 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2964 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2965
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002966- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2967 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2968 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2969 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2970
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002971- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2972 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002974 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2975 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2976 new -l and -e options.
2977
2978- statcache is now deprecated.
2979
2980- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2981 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002983 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2984 time properly taken into account.
2985
2986- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2987 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2988 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2989 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2990
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002991Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002993
2994Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002996
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002997- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2998 is built with libdb3 if available.
2999
3000- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003004
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003005- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3006 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3007 PySequence_Size().
3008
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003009- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3010
3011- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3012 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3013 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3014
3015- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3016 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3017
3018- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3019 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3020
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003021New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003023
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003024- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3025 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3026
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003027- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3028 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3029
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003030- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3031
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003032Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003034
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003035- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3036 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3037
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003038Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003040
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003041Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003043
3044- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3045 removed completely in the next release.
3046
3047- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3048 OSX.
3049
3050- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3051 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3052
3053- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3054
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003055
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003056What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003057===========================
3058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3060
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003061Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003063
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003064- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003065 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003066 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003067 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3068 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003069 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3070 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003071 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3072 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003073
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003074- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3075 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3076
3077- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3078 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3079
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003080Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003081-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003082
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003083- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3084 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3085 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3086 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3087 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3088 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3089 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3090 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3091
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003092- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3093 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3094 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3095 example).
3096
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003097- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003098 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003099 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003100 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003101
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003102- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3103 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3104 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003105 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003106
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003107- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3108 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3109 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3110 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3111 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3112 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3113
3114 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3115
3116 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003118Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003120
3121- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3122
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003123- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3124
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003125- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3126 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003127
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003128- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3129 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3130 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3131 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3132 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3133 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003134 attributes.
3135
3136- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3137 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3138 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003139
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003140- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3141 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3142 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003143
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003144- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3145 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3146 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003147 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3148 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3149
3150- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3151 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003152
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003155
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003156- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3157 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3158
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003159- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3160 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3161 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3162 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3163
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003164- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3165 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3166 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3167 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3168
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003169 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3170 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3171 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3172 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3173 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3174 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3175 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3176 without losing information).
3177
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003178- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003179 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3180 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3181 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3182 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3183 module).
3184
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003185 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003186 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3187 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3188 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3189 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003190
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003191- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003192 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3193 encoding.
3194
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003195- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3196 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3197
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003198- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003199 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3200
3201- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3202 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3203 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3204 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3205
3206- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3207
3208- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3209 ON, and OFF.
3210
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003211- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3212 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3213
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003214Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003216
3217- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3218 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3219 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003220
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003221- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3222 been added: -X and -E.
3223
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003226
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003227- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3228 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3229
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003230C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003232
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003233- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3234 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3235 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3236 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3237 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3238
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003239- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3240 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3241 as long) arguments.
3242
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003243- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3244 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3245 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3246 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3247 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3248 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3249
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003250- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3251 input.
3252
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003253New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003255
3256Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003258
3259Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003261
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003262- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3263 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3264 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3265
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003266- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3267 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3268 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003269 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3272 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3273 import signal
3274 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003277 while 1:
3278 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003280 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3281 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3282 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3283 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003284
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003285
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003286What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3287===========================
3288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3290
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003291Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003293
3294- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3295 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3296 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3297
3298- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3299 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3300 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3301 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3302 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3303 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3304 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003305
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003306- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003307 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003308 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3309 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3310 associate a docstring with a property.
3311
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003312- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3313 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3314 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3315 other built-in object types.
3316
3317- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3318 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3319 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3320 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3321 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3322
3323- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3324 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3325
3326- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3327 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003328 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003329 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3330 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3331 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3332 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3333 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3334
3335- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3336 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3337 class.
3338
3339- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3340 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3341 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3342 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3343
3344- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3345 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3346 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3347 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3348
3349- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3350 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3351
3352- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3353 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3354 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3355 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3356 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003357 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003358 with the same value as s.
3359
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003360- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3361
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003362Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003364
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003365- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3366
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003367- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3368 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3369 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3370 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3371 objects.
3372
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003373- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3374 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003375 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3376 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3377
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003378- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3379 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3380 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003382Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003384
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003385- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3386 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3387 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3388 by the instances.
3389
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003390- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3391 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3392 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3393
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003394- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3395 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3396 before the entire comparison is complete.
3397
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003398- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3399 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3400 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3401
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003402- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3403 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3404 getwriter().
3405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003406- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3407 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3408
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003409- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003410 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3411 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3412
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003413- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3414 iterable object.
3415
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003416- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3417 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003419- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3420 authentication.
3421
3422- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3423 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003424
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003425- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003426 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3427 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3428 a sample driver.)
3429
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003433- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3434 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3435 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3436 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3437 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3438 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3439 kernel has large file support.
3440
3441- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3442 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3443 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3444 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3445 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3446
3447- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3448 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3449 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3450
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003451C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003453
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003454- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3455 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3456
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003457New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003459
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003460- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3461 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3462
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003463Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003465
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003466- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3467 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3468 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3469 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3470 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3471
3472- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3473 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3474 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3475 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3476
3477- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3478 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3479
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003480Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003482
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003483- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003484 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3485 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003486
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003487
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003488What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3489===========================
3490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3492
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003493Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003495
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003496- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3497 big to represent as a C double.
3498
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003499- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3500 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3501 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3502 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3503 restriction).
3504
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003505- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3506 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3507 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3508 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3509 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3510
3511 >>> dir([])
3512 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3513 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3514 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3515 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3516 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3517 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3518 'reverse', 'sort']
3519
3520 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3521
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003522- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003523 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3524 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3525 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3526 OverflowError exception.
3527
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003528- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003529 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003530 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3531 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3532 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3533 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3534 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003535 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3537 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3538
3539 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3540 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3541 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3542 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003543
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003544- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003545 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3546 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3547 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3548 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3549 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3550 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3551 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3552 once it is created.
3553
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003554- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3555 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3556 (key, value) pairs.
3557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003558- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003559 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3560 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3561
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003562- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3563 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3564 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3565 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3566 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003567
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003568- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003569 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3570 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3571
3572 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003574- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003575 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3576
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003577Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003579
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003580- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003581 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3582 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003583
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003584- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3585 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3586 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3587 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3588 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3589 in this area anymore).
3590
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003591- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3592 threading.Timer.
3593
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003594- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3595 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3596
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003597- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003598 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003600- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003601 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3602 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3603 converted to Python longs.
3604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003605- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003606 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3607
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003608- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3609 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3610 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3611
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003612Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003614
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003615- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3616 division operators as per PEP 238.
3617
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003618Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003620
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003621- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3622 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3623 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3624 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3625
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003626C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003628
3629- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003630
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003631- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3632 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003633 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003634
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3636 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003637 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003640- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003641 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3642 module:
3643
3644 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003645
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003646 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3647 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003648
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003649 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3650 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003651
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003652 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3653
3654 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3655
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003656- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003657 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3658 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3659 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003660
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003661New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003663
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003664- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3665 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3666 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3667 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3668 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003669
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003672
3673Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003675
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003676- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3677 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3678 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3679 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003680 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3681 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3682 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3683 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3684 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003686- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003687 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3688
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003689
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003690What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3691===========================
3692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3694
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003695Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003697
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003698- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3699 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3700
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003701- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3702 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3703 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003704
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003705- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3706 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3707 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3708 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003709
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003710- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3711
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003713
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003714Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003716
3717- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003718 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003719 the module docstring for details.
3720
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003721Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003723
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003724- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003725 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3726 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3727 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003728
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003729- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3730 Nick Mathewson.
3731
3732Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003734
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003735- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3736 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3737 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3738 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3739 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3740 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3741 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3742 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3743
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003744- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3745 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3746 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3747 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3748
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003749- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3750 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3751 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3752 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3753 come a long way).
3754
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003755- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3756 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3757 write filters for these warnings).
3758
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003759- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3760 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3761 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3762 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3763 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3764
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003765- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3766 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3767 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3768 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3769 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3770 older distribution.
3771
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003774
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003775- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3776 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003777 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003778
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003779- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3780 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3781 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3782
3783- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3784
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003785- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3786
3787- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3788
3789- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003792
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003793- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3794
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003795New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003797
3798C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003800
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003801- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3802 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3803 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3804 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3805 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3806 against buffer overruns.
3807
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003808- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003809 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3810 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003811 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3812 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3813 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3814
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003815- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3816 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3817 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3818 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3819 deprecated.
3820
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003821Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003823
3824- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3825 relevant is found.
3826
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003827
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003828What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003829===========================
3830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3832
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003833Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003835
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003836- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3837 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3838 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3839 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3840 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3841 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3842 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3843 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003844 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003845 repaired.
3846
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003847- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003848 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003849 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3850 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3851 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3852 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3853 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3854 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3855 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3856 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3857
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003858- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3859 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3860 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3861 leading BMO character).
3862
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003863- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3864 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3865 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3866
3867 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3868 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3869 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003870
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003871 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3872 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3873 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3874 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3875 for various simple to use conversions.
3876
3877 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3878 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3879
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3881 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3882 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3883 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3885 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3886 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3887 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3888 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3889 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3890 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3891 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3892 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3893 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3894 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003895
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003896- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3897 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3898 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003899 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003900 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003901
3902 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003903 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3904 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3905 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3906 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3907 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003908 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3909 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003910
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003911 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3912 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3913 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003914 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003915
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003916- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3917 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3918 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3919 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3920 floating arithmetic,
3921
3922 x = 9007199254740992.0
3923 print long(x)
3924
3925 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3926 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3927 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3928 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3929 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3930 functions are of good quality).
3931
3932 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3933 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3934 algorithms to break.
3935
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003936- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3937 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3938 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3939 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3940 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3941 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3942 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3943 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3944 order.
3945
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003946- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3947 operation along the most common code paths.
3948
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003949- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3950 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3951
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003952- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3953 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3954 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3955 {}.update(UserDict())
3956
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003957- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3958 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3959 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3960 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3961 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3962 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3963 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3964 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3965
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003966- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003967 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003969 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003970 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3971 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003972 join() method of strings
3973 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003974 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3975 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003977 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003978
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003979- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3980 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3981
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003982- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3983 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3984
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003985- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3986 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3987 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3988 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3989
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003990- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3991 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003992 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003993 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3994 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003995
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003996- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3997
3998
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003999Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004001
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004002- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004003 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004004 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4005 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4006
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004007- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4008 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4009
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004010- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4011 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4012 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4013 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4014
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004015- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4016 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4017 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4018
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004019- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4020
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004021- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4022
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004023- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4024 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4025 that are still imported into string.py).
4026
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004027- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4028
4029- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4030 Now it does.
4031
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004032- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4033
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004034- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4035 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4036 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4037 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4038 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004039 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4040 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004041
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004042- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4043 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4044 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4045 'help(object)'.
4046
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004047Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004049
4050- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004051 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004052 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4053 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4054
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004055- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004056 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4057 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004058
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004059C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004061
4062- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4063 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064
4065----
4066
4067**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**