blob: cb598d5535b73e214ec71be4f5bb8200debd3228 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000015- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
16 and long longs.
17
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000018- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
19 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
20 message in this case.
21
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000022- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
23 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
24 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
25 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
26 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
27
28- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
29
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000030- Speed up some Unicode operations.
31
32- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
33
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000034- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000035 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
36
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000037- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
38
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000039- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
40 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
41
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000042- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
43
44- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
45
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000046- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
47 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
48 was empty.
49
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000050- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
51 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
52
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000053- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000054 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000056- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
57 codes.
58
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000059- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
60 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
61 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
62
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000063- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
64 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
65
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000066- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000067 (fixes bug #1119418).
68
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000069- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
70
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000071- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
72 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
73
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000074- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
75 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
76 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
77
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000078- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
79
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000080- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
81 reference counts in some error exit cases.
82
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000083- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
84 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
85 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
86 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
87 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
88 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
89 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
90 realloc.
91
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000092- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
93 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
94
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000095- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
96 like their int counterparts.
97
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000098- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
99 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
100 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
101 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
102 for a longer write-up of the problem).
103
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000104- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
105 serializing floats.
106
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000107- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
108 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
109 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
110
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000111- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
112 278.
113
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000114- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
115 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
116 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
117 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000118 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000119 PyNumber_*().
120 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
121
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000122- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
123 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
124 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
125 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
126
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000127- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
128 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
129 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
130 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
131 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
132
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000133- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
134 disabled caused a crash.
135
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000136- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
137 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
138
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000139- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000140 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
141
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000142- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
143
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000144- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000145 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
146 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
147 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000148
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000149- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
150
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000151- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
152 returning None.
153
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000154- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000155 ('\') with a specific error message.
156
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000157- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
158
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000159- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
160 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
161
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000162- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000163 an ferror() call.
164
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000165- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
166 list.sort().
167
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000168- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
169 (2+3) --> (5).
170
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000171- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
172
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000173- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
174 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000175
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000176- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
177 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
178 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
179
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000180- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
181 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
182 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
183
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000184Extension Modules
185-----------------
186
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000187- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
188
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000189- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
190
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000191- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
192
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000193- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
194 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
195
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000196- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
197
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000198- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
199 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
200
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000201- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
202
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000203- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
204 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
205
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000206- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
207 returns in cStringIO.c.
208
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000209- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
210 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
211
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000212- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
213
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000214- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
215
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000216- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
217 the file system encoding.
218
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000219- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
220 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000221
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000222- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
223
224- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000225 line without newlines.
226
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000227- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
228 on Windows.
229
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000230- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000231 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
232
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000233- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
234 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
235 for large or negative values.
236
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000237- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000238 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000239
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000240- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
241
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000242- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
243 if available on the platform.
244
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000245- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
246 available on the platform.
247
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000248- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
249 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
250
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000251- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
252
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000253- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
254 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
255 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
256
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000257- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
258
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000259- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
260 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
261
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000262- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000263 file size.
264
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000265- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
266
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000267- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
268 {remove_history,replace_history}
269
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000270- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
271 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000272
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000273- stat_float_times is now True.
274
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000275- array.array objects are now picklable.
276
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000277- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
278 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
279
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000280- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
281 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
282 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
283
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000284- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
285 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000286
287Library
288-------
289
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000290- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
291
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000292- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
293
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000294- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
295 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
296 illegal argument)
297
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000298- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
299 is an error in the format string.
300
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000301- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
302
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000303- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000304 "parent" argument.
305
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000306- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
307 for padding.
308
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000309- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
310 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
311
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000312- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
313 to get the correct encoding.
314
315- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
316 languages.
317
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000318- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
319
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000320- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
321
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000322- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
323
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000324- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
325 functionality.
326
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000327- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
328
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000329- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
330 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
331
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000332- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
333 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
334 match the Content-Length header.
335
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000336- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
337
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000338- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
339 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000340 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000341
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000342- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
343
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000344- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
345
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000346- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
347 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
348
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000349- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
350 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
351 Tkdnd.
352
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000353- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
354 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
355
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000356- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
357 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
358
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000359- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000360 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
361
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000362- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
363 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
364
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000365- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
366 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
367
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000368- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000369 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000370
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000371- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
372
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000373- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
374 error messages.
375
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000376- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
377
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000378- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
379 Bug #1224621.
380
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000381- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
382 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
383 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
384 terminates by raising StopIteration.
385
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000386- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
387
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000388- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
389 component of the path.
390
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000391- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
392 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
393 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
394 class at all.
395
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000396- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
397 files to PyPI.
398
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000399- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
400 them to PyPI.
401
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000402- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
403 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
404 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
405 work as expected.
406
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000407- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
408 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
409
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000410- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000411 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
412
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000413- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
414
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000415- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
416 to build.
417
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000418- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
419 symbolic links on Windows.
420
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000421- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000422 profile.py if available.
423
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000424- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
425
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000426- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
427 in LWPCookieJar.
428
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000429- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
430
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000431- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
432
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000433- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
434
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000435- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
436
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000437- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
438
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000439- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
440
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000441- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
442
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000443- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
444
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000445- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
446 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
447 be exploited in various ways.
448
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000449- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
450
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000451- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
452
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000453- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
454
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000455- Enhancements to the csv module:
456
457 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000458 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000459 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000460 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
461 reporting.
462 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
463 dictates.
464 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000465 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000466 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000467 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
468 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000469 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
470 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000471 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000472 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
473 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
474 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
475 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
476 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
477 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
478 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
479 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
480 without first creating a dialect class.
481 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
482 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
483 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000484 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000485 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
486 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000487 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
488 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
489 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
490 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000491 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
492 This has been fixed.
493
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000494- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
495 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
496 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
497 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
498
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000499- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
500
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000501- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
502 (Bug #951915).
503
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000504- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
505 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
506 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000507 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000508
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000509- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
510
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000511- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
512 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
513
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000514- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
515
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000516- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
517
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000518- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
519
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000520- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
521
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000522- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
523
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000524- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
525 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
526 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
527
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000528- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000529 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000530
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000531- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
532 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
533 tokenizer with very long source lines.
534
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000535- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
536 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
537
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000538- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
539 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000540
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000541- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
542 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
543
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000544- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
545 correctly.
546
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000547- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
548 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
549 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
550 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
551 between two lines.
552
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000553- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
554 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
555 handlers.
556
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000557- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000558 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
559 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000560
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000561- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
562 considering it exactly like a '*'.
563
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000564- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
565 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000566
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000567- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
568
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000569Build
570-----
571
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000572- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
573 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
574
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000575- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
576 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
577
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000578- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
579 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
580 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000581 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000582
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000583- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
584 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
585 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
586
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000587- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
588
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000589- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
590 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
591
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000592- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
593 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
594 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
595 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
596 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
597 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
598 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
599 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
600
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000601- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
602 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
603 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
604 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
605
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000606
607C API
608-----
609
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000610- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
611
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000612- Removed PyRange_New().
613
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000614- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
615 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
616 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
617 mappings.
618
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000619
620Tests
621-----
622
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000623- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000624
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000625
626Documentation
627-------------
628
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000629- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
630
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000631- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
632
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000633- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
634
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000635- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
636
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000637- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
638
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000639- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
640
641- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
642
643- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
644
645- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
646
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000647- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
648 Closes bug #1166582.
649
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000650- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
651 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
652 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
653
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000654Mac
655---
656
657
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000658New platforms
659-------------
660
661- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
662
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000663
664Tools/Demos
665-----------
666
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000667- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
668 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
669 source files that need an encoding declaration.
670 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
671
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000672- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
673
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000674- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000675
676
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000677What's New in Python 2.4 final?
678===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000679
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000680*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000681
682Core and builtins
683-----------------
684
685- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
686 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
687 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
688
689
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000690What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
691==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000692
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000693*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000694
695Core and builtins
696-----------------
697
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000698- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
699 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
700 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
701
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000702
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000703Library
704-------
705
706- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
707 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
708 raised is re-raised.
709
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000710- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
711 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
712
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000713- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
714 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
715 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
716 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
717 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
718 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
719 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
720 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
721 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
722 by the slice are recomputed now.
723
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000724- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000725
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000726Build
727-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000728
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000729- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
730 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
731 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000732
733C API
734-----
735
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000736- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
737
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000738
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000739What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
740================================
741
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000742*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000743
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000744License
745-------
746
747The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
748is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
749changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
750Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
751intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
752durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
753the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
754License::
755
756 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
757
758says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
759to Python 2.1.1.
760
761The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
762License Version 2.
763
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000764Core and builtins
765-----------------
766
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000767- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
768 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
769 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
770 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
771 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
772 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
773 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000774 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000775 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
776 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
777
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000778- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000779
780Extension Modules
781-----------------
782
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000783- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
784 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
785 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
786 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000787
788Library
789-------
790
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000791- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
792 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
793 returned.
794
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000795- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
796
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000797- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
798 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
799
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000800- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
801
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000802- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
803 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000804
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000805- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
806
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000807- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
808
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000809- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000810 the source code is updated and reloaded.
811
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000812Build
813-----
814
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000815- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000816
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000817What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
818================================
819
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000820*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000821
822Core and builtins
823-----------------
824
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000825- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000826 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
827
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000828- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
829 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
830 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
831 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
832
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000833- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
834 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
835
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000836- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
837 constant.
838
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000839- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
840 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
841 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
842 large), and to anomalies such as
843 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
844 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
845 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
846 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000847
848Extension modules
849-----------------
850
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000851- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
852 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000853 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
854 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
855 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000856
857Library
858-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000859
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000860- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000861 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000862 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
863 --swig-cpp.
864
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000865- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
866 it is set.
867
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000868- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000869
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000870- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
871 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
872 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
873 Closes bug #1039270.
874
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000875- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000876
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000877 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000878 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
879 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
880 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
881 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
882 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
883 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
884 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
885 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
886 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
887 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
888 + Updates to documentation.
889
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000890- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
891 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
892 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
893 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
894
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000895- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000896
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000897- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
898 applications should use the getmember function.
899
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000900- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
901
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000902- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
903 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
904 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
905 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
906 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
907 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
908 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
909 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
910 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
911
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000912- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
913 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000914 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000915
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000916- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
917 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
918 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
919 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
920 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
921 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
922 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
923 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000924
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000925- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
926 the new public features (of which there are many).
927
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000928- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000929 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
930 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
931 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
932 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000933 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000934
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000935- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
936
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000937- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
938 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
939 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
940 options.
941
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000942- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
943 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
944 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
945 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
946 conditions under which non-string values work.
947
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000948Build
949-----
950
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000951- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
952 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
953 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
954
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000955- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
956 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
957 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
958 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
959 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000960
961C API
962-----
963
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000964- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
965 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
966
967- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
968
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000969- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
970 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
971 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
972 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
973 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
974 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
975 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
976 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
977 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
978
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000979- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
980
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000981- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
982 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
983 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000984
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000985Tests
986-----
987
988- test__locale ported to unittest
989
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000990Mac
991---
992
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000993- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
994 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
995 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000996
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000997Tools/Demos
998-----------
999
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001000- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1001 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1002 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1003 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1004 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001005
1006
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1008=================================
1009
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001010*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001011
1012Core and builtins
1013-----------------
1014
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001015- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001016 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1017
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001018- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1019 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1020 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1021 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1022 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1023 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1024 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1025 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001026 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1027 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1028 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1029 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1030 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001031
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001032- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1033 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1034 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1035 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1036 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1037
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001038- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1039
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001040- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1041 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1042
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001043- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1044 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1045 modified the list.
1046
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001047- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1048 functions is now writable.
1049
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001050- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1051 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1052 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1053 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1054
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001055- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1056 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1057 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1058 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1059 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001060
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001061- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1062 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1063
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001064Extension modules
1065-----------------
1066
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001067- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1068
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001069- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1070 data.
1071
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001072- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1073 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1074 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1075 supposed to have been truncated away.
1076
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001077- Added socket.socketpair().
1078
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001079- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1080 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1081
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001082- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001083 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1084
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001085Library
1086-------
1087
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001088- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001089 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001090
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001091- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1092 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1093
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001094- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1095 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1096
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001097- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1098
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001099- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1100 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001101
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001102- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1103 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1104
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001105- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1106
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001107- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1108
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001109- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1110
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001111- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1112 Percivall.
1113
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001114- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1115 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1116
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001117- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1118 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1119 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001120 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001121
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001122- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1123 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1124 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1125 and exponent.
1126
1127- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1128
1129- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001130 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001131 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1132
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001133- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1134 to the readline module.
1135
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001136- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001137 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1138 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001139
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001140- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1141 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1142 contains symlinks.
1143
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001144- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1145 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1146
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001147- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1148 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1149 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1150
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001151- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1152 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1153 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1154 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1155 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1156 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1157 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1158 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1159 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1160 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1161 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1162 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1163 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1164
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001165- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1166
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001167Tools/Demos
1168-----------
1169
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001170- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1171 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1172
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001173- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001175Build
1176-----
1177
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001178- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1179 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1180 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1181 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1182 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1183 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1184 plans to do so.
1185
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001186- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1187 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1188
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001189- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1190 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1191
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001192- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1193 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1194
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001195- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1196 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1197
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001198- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1199 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1200
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001201C API
1202-----
1203
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001204..
1205
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001206Documentation
1207-------------
1208
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001209- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1210 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1211
1212- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1213 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1214 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001215
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001216New platforms
1217-------------
1218
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001219- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1220
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001221Tests
1222-----
1223
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001224..
1225
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001226Windows
1227-------
1228
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001229- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1230 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1231 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1232 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1233 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1234 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1235 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1236 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1237 the problem.
1238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001239Mac
1240---
1241
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001242..
1243
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001244
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001245What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1246=================================
1247
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001248*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001249
1250Core and builtins
1251-----------------
1252
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001253- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1254 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1255 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1256 sensitive code.
1257
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001258- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001259 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001260
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001261 @staticmethod
1262 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001263
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001264 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001265
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001266- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1267 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1268 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1269 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1270 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1271 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1272 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1273 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1274 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1275 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1276 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1277
1278 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1279 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1280 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1281 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1282 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1283 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1284 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1285
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001286- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1287 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1288
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001289- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001290 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001291
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001292- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001293 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001294 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1295
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001296- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001297 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1298 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1299
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001300- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1301 types that support garbage collection.
1302
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001303- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1304
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001305- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1306 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1307 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1308 Jython.
1309
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001310- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1311
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001312- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1313 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1314
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001315- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1316 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1317 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001318
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001319- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1320 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1321 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1322
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001323Extension modules
1324-----------------
1325
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001326- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1327
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001328Library
1329-------
1330
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001331- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1332 TIS-620
1333
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001334- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1335 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1336 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1337 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1338 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1339 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1340 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1341 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1342 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1343 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1344
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001345- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1346
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001347- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1348 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1349 same as when the argument is omitted).
1350 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1351
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001352- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1353
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001354- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1355 schemes are offered.
1356
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001357- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1358
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001359- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1360 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1361 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1362
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001363- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1364
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001365- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1366 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1367
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001368- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1369 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1370 when dummy_threading is being used.
1371
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001372- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1373 from a tarfile.
1374
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001375- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001376 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001377
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001378- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1379 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1380 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1381 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1382
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001383- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1384 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1385
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001386- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1387 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1388 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1389 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1390 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1391 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1392 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1393 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1394 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1395 by some other method in progress).
1396
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001397- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1398 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1399 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001400
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001401- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1402
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001403- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1404 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1405 AM Kuchling.
1406
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001407- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1408 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1409 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1410
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001411- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1412 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1413 instead of unsigned.
1414
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001415- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001416 no longer part of the public API.
1417
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001418- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1419 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1420 string methods of the same name).
1421
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001422- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001423 SF patch 945642.
1424
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001425- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1426
1427 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1428
1429 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1430 DocTestSuites.
1431
1432- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1433 that provide thread-local data.
1434
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001435- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1436 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1437
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001438- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1439
1440- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1441 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1442 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1443
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001444- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1445
1446 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1447 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1448 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001449
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001450 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1451 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1452 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1453 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1454
1455 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1456 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1457
1458 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1459 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1460 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1461 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1462
1463 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1464 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1465 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1466 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1467 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1468
1469 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1470 wrapping help output.
1471
1472 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1473 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1474 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001475
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001476C API
1477-----
1478
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001479- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1480 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1481 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1482 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1483 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1484 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1485 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1486 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1487 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1488 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1489 its visible semantics have not changed.
1490
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001491- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1492 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1493
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001494Documentation
1495-------------
1496
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001497- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001498
1499 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001500 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001501
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001502 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001503
1504 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1505
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001506- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001507
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001508Tests
1509-----
1510
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001511- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001512 platforms that use the Makefile.
1513
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001514- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1515 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1516 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1517
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001518
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001519What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1520=================================
1521
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001522*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001523
1524Core and builtins
1525-----------------
1526
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001527- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1528 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1529 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1530 objects now (one object instead of three).
1531
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001532- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1533 Windows DLLs.
1534
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001535- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1536 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001537
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001538- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1539 a new .pyc magic.
1540
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001541- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1542 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1543 be there.
1544
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001545- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1546 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1547 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1548
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001549- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1550 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1551 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1552
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001553- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1554
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001555- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1556 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1557 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001558
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001559- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1560 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1561
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001562- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1563
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001564- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001565 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001566
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001567- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1568
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001569- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1570
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001571- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1572 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1573
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001574- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1575 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1576 Fixes bug #858016 .
1577
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001578- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1579 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1580 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1581
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001582- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1583 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1584 improves their performance (about 35%).
1585
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001586- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1587 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1588 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1589
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001590- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1591 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1592 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1593 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1594
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001595- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1596 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001597 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001598 length is not known).
1599
1600- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1601 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001602 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1603 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001604 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1605
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001606- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1607 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1608
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001609- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1610 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1611 keyword arguments.
1612
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001613- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1614 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1615 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1616
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001617- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1618 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1619 cases.
1620
1621- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1622 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1623 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1624 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1625 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1626 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1627 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1628 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1629 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1630 a release build.
1631
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001632- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1633 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1634
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001635- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001636 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001637
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001638- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1639 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1640 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1641 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1642 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1643 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1644 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1645 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1646 destroyed.
1647
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001648- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1649 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1650 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1651 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1652 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1653 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1654 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1655 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1656
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001657- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1658 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1659 character other than a space.
1660
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001661- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1662 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1663 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1664 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1665 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1666 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1667 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1668 attributes with the same name.
1669
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001670- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1671 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1672 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1673 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1674 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1675 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1676 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1677 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1678 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1679 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1680 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1681 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1682 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1683 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001684
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001685- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1686 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1687 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1688 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1689 This has been repaired.
1690
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001691- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1692
1693- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1694
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001695- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1696 over a sequence.
1697
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001698- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001699 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001700
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001701- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1702
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001703- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1704 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1705 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1706 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1707 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1708 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1709 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1710 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1711
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001712- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1713 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1714 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1715
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001716- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1717 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1718 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1719 freelist.
1720
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001721- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1722 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1723
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001724- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1725 number.
1726
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001727- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1728 a TypeError exception.
1729
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001730- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1731 820195.
1732
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001733- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1734 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1735 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1736
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001737- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001738 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1739 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001740
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001741- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1742 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1743 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1744
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001745- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1746 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001747 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001748
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001749- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001750 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1751 the first call.
1752
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001753
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001754Extension modules
1755-----------------
1756
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001757- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1758 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1759
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001760- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1761 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1762 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1763 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1764 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1765 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1766 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001767
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001768- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1769
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001770- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1771
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001772- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1773 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1774
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001775- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1776 fewer false positives.
1777
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001778- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1779 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1780
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001781- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001782 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1783
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001784- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001785 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001786 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001787 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1788 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001789
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001790- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1791 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1792 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1793 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1794
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001795- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1796 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1797 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1798 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1799 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1800 #897625.
1801
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001802- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1803 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1804
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001805- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1806 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1807 and pops on either side of the deque.
1808
1809- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1810 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1811
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001812- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1813 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1814 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1815 other functions that expect a function argument.
1816
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001817- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1818
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001819- os.getsid was added.
1820
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001821- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1822 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1823 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1824
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001825- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1826
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001827- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1828
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001829- readline.clear_history was added.
1830
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001831- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1832
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001833- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1834
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001835- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1836
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001837- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1838
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001839- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1840
1841- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1842
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001843- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1844
1845- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1846
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001847- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1848 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1849 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1850
1851- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1852 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1853 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1854 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1855 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1856 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1857 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1858
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001859- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1860 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1861 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1862 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001863
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001864- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001865 iterators from a single iterable.
1866
1867- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1868 of raising a TypeError exception.
1869
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001870- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1871 as parameter.
1872
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001873Library
1874-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001875
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001876- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1877
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001878- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1879 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1880 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001881
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001882- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1883 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1884 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001885
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001886- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001887
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001888- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1889 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001890
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001891- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1892 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1893
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001894- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1895
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001896- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001897 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001898
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001899- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001900 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001901
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001902- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1903
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001904- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1905 on cygwin and mingw32.
1906
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001907- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1908
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001909- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1910 module.
1911
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001912- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1913 installation scheme for all platforms.
1914
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001915- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001916 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001917
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001918- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1919 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1920 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1921
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001922- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1923 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1924 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1925
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001926- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1927
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001928- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1929
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001930- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1931 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1932
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001933- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1934 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1935 type pattern with the same value exists.
1936
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001937- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1938 when run from the command prompt).
1939
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001940- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1941 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1942
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001943- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1944 default sort).
1945
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001946- Added global runctx function to profile module
1947
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001948- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1949
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001950- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1951
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001952- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1953
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001954- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001955 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1956 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1957 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1958 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1959 accordingly.
1960
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001961- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1962 decoding standards.
1963
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001964- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1965 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1966 called for all requests.
1967
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001968- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1969 they are passed to the compiler.
1970
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001971- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1972 indent, width and depth.
1973
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001974- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1975 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1976
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001977- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1978 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1979
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001980- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1981
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001982- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1983
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001984- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1985
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001986- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1987 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1988
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001989- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001990 for better performance.
1991
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001992- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001993
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001994- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1995 a string).
1996
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001997- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1998
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001999- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2000
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002001- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2002
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002003- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2004
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002005- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2006 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2007 list of fieldnames.
2008
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002009- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2010 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2011
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002012- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2013
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002014- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2015 empty lists.
2016
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002017- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2018 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2019 and shelves.
2020
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002021- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2022 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2023
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002024- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002025 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2026 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002027
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002028- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2029 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002030 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002031
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002032- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002033 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2034 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2035
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002036- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2037 and removed in Py2.4.
2038
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002039- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2040
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002041- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2042
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002043Tools/Demos
2044-----------
2045
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002046- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2047 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2048
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002049- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2050
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002051- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2052 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2053 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2054 destination in situations where both files are given.
2055
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002056- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2057 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2058 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2059 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2060
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002061- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2062
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002063- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2064 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2065 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2066 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2067 now.
2068
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002069- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2070 in effect
2071
2072- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2073 C-c C-h
2074
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002075- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2076 -d option was given.
2077
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002078Build
2079-----
2080
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002081- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2082 build under OS X.
2083
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002084- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2085 --enable-profiling.
2086
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002087- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2088 is configured --with-tsc.
2089
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002090- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2091 on AMD64.
2092
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002093- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2094 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2095
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002096- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2097 removed.
2098
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002099- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2100 supported (see PEP 11).
2101
2102- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2103
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002104- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2105
2106- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2107 (see PEP 11).
2108
2109- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2110 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2111
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002112C API
2113-----
2114
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002115- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2116 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2117 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2118
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002119- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2120 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2121 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2122 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2123
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002124- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2125 generator objects.
2126
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002127- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2128 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002129 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2130 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002131
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002132- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2133 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2134
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002135- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2136 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2137 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2138 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2139 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2140
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002141- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2142 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2143 about 10% faster.
2144
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002145- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2146 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2147
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002148- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2149 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2150 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2151 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2152
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002153Windows
2154-------
2155
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002156- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2157 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2158 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2159 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2160
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002161- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2162 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2163 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2164
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002165
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002166What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2167===============================
2168
2169*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2170
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002171IDLE
2172----
2173
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002174- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2175 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2176 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2177 context-menu actions.
2178
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002179- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2180 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2181 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2182 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2183 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2184 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2185 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2186 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2187 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2188
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002189
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002190What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2191=============================================
2192
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002193*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002194
2195Core and builtins
2196-----------------
2197
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002198- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002199 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002200 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2201
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002202Extension modules
2203-----------------
2204
2205- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2206 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2207 than once. This has been fixed.
2208
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002209- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2210 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2211 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2212 call.
2213
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002214- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2215
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002216Library
2217-------
2218
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002219- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2220 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2221
2222- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2223 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2224 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2225 restored.
2226
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002227IDLE
2228----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002229
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002230- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002231
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002232Build
2233-----
2234
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002235- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2236 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2237
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002238C API
2239-----
2240
2241Windows
2242-------
2243
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002244- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2245 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2246
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002247- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2248
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002249Mac
2250---
2251
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002252- Various fixes to pimp.
2253
2254- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2255
2256- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2257 more problems than it solves.
2258
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002259
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002260What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2261=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002262
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002263*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2264
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002265Core and builtins
2266-----------------
2267
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002268- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2269 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2270
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002271- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2272 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002273 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002274
2275- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2276 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2277 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002278 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002279
2280- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2281 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002282
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002283- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2284 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2285 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2286
2287- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288 770247.
2289
2290- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002291
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002292Extension modules
2293-----------------
2294
2295- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2296 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2297
2298- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2299
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002300- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2301
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002302- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2303 contained within the _strptime module.
2304
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002305- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2306 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2307
2308- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002309 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2310
2311- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2312 the find_class attribute, if present.
2313
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002314- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002315
2316 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2317 (SF bug 763298).
2318
2319 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002320 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2321 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2322 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002323
2324 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2325
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002326Library
2327-------
2328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2330
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002331- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2332 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2333 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2334 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2335 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2336 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2337 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2338 or Tester().
2339
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002340- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2341 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2342 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2343 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2344 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2345 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2346 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2347 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2348 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002349
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002350 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002351
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002352- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2353 weren't before was an oversight.
2354
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002355- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2356 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2357
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002358- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2359 when there are no lines.
2360
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002361- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2362 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2363
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002364- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2365 to child processes.
2366
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002367- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2368
2369- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2370
2371- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2372 xmlrpclib.
2373
2374- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2375 responses.
2376
2377- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2378 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2379
2380- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2381 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2382 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2383
2384- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2385 used as patterns.
2386
2387- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2388 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2389 than Tk 8.3.
2390
2391- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2392
2393- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002394
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002395Tools/Demos
2396-----------
2397
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002398- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2399
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002400- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2401
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002402- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002403
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002404Build
2405-----
2406
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002407- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2408
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002409- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2410
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002411- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2412 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002413
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002414- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2415 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2416 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002417
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002418C API
2419-----
2420
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002421- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2422 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2423
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002424Windows
2425-------
2426
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002427- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2428 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2429 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2430 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2431 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2432 Python exception ::
2433
2434 thread.error: can't start new thread
2435
2436 is raised now.
2437
2438- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2439 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2440 instead of from DLL teardown.
2441
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002442Mac
2443---
2444
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002445- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002446 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002447 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2448 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2449 the executable in the bundle.
2450
2451- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002452
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002453- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2454
2455- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2456 on Panther.
2457
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002458What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2459================================
2460
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002461*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002462
2463Core and builtins
2464-----------------
2465
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002466- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2467 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2468 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2469 with the -i option.
2470
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002471- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2472 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2473
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002474- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2475 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2476
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002477- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2478 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2479 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2480 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2481 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2482 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2483 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2484 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2485 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2486 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2487 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2488 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2489 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002490
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002491- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2492 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2493 embedded in a lambda expression.
2494
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002495- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2496 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2497 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2498 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2499 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2500
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002501- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2502 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2503 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2504
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002505- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2506 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2507
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002508- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2509 It's writable again.
2510
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002511- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2512 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2513 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002514 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002515
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002516- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2517 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2518 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2519
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002520Extension modules
2521-----------------
2522
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002523- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2524 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2525
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002526- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2527 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2528 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2529 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2530
2531- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2532 collection.
2533
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002534- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2535 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2536 unique within a single program run.
2537
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002538- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2539 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2540
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002541- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2542 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2543
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002544- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2545 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002546
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002547- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2548
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002549- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2550 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2551
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002552- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2553 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2554 for many BSD-derived systems.
2555
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002556
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002557Library
2558-------
2559
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002560- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2561 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2562 primary ones:
2563
2564 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2565 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2566 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2567
2568 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2569 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2570 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2571 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2572 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2573 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2574
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002575- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2576 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2577 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2578 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2579 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2580 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2581 argument.
2582
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002583- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2584 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2585 in the archive.
2586
2587- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2588 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2589
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002590- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2591 569574).
2592
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002593- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2594 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2595 no more.
2596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002597- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2598 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2599 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2600 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2601 code coverage.
2602
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002603- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2604 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2605 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002606 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2607 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002608
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002609- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2610 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2611 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002612 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002613
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002614- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2615
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002616- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2617 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2618 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2619 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2620
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002621- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2622 handling.
2623
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002624- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2625 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2626
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002627- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2628 in socket.py.
2629
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002630- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2631
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002632- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2633 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2634 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2635 opener with proxy support.
2636
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002637- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2638
2639- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2640
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002641Tools/Demos
2642-----------
2643
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002644- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2645
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002646- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2647
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002648- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2649 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002650
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002651- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2652 files.
2653
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002654Build
2655-----
2656
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002657- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002658 different root directory.
2659
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002660C API
2661-----
2662
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002663- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2664 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2665 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2666 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2667 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2668 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2669 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2670 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2671 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2672 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2673
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002674- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2675 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2676 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2677 from Python.
2678
2679
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002680New platforms
2681-------------
2682
2683None this time.
2684
2685Tests
2686-----
2687
2688- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2689 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2690
2691Windows
2692-------
2693
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002694- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2695
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002696- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2697 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2698 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2699 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2700 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2701 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2702 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2703 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2704 that's what it's for.
2705
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002706Mac
2707---
2708
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002709- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2710 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2711 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2712 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002713- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2714 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2715- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002716
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002717SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2718------------------------------------
2719
2720430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2721598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2722622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2723661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2724683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2725697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2726713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2727724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2728727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2729729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2730730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2731731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2732732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2733733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2734735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2735740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2736744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2737745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2738747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2739749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2740751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2741753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2742755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2743757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2744760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2745
2746
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002747What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2748================================
2749
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002750*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002751
2752Core and builtins
2753-----------------
2754
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002755- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2756 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2757
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002758- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2759 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2760 and cannot be strings).
2761
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002762- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2763 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2764 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2765 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2766
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002767- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2768 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2769 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2770 Python itself.
2771
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002772- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2773 the referenced object, if it has one.
2774
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002775- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2776 the thread started at
2777 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2778
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002779- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2780 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2781 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2782 placed on a list index.
2783
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002784- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2785 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2786 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2787 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2788
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002789- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2790 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2791 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2792 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2793 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2794 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2795 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2796
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002797- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2798 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2799 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2800 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2801 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2802
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002803- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2804 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002805
2806- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2807 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2808 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2809 #693195.)
2810
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002811- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2812 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002813
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002814- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002815 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002816 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2817 interpreter executions, would fail.
2818
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002819- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002820 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002821 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002822
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002823Extension modules
2824-----------------
2825
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002826- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2827 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2828 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2829 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2830
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002831- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2832 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2833
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002834- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2835 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2836 and Greg Chapman.)
2837
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002838- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2839 recursively.
2840
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002841- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002842 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2843 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2844 leaks.
2845
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002846- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2847
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002848- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2849 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2850 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2851 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2852 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2853 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2854 #705836.
2855
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002856- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002857 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2858
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002859- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2860 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2861 See SF bug #692416.
2862
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002863- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2864 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2865
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002866- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2867 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2868 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002869
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002870- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002871 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2872 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2873
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002874- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2875 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2876 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2877 timeouts to work properly.
2878
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002879Library
2880-------
2881
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002882- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2883 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2884 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2885 future release.
2886
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002887- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2888 for querying platform dependent features.
2889
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002890- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002891
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002892- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2893 pickle protocol versions.
2894
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002895- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2896 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2897 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2898
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002899- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2900
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002901- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2902 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2903 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2904 modules.
2905
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002906- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2907 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2908 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2909
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002910- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2911 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2912
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002913- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2914 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2915 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2916
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002917- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002918 MS Office extensions.
2919
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002920- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2921 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2922
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002923- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2924 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2925
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002926- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2927 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2928 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2929 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2930 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2931 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2932
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002933- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2934 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2935 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002936
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002937- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2938 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2939 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2940
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002941- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2942
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002943- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2944 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2945 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2946
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002947Tools/Demos
2948-----------
2949
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002950- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2951 See the module docstring for details.
2952
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002953Build
2954-----
2955
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002956- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2957 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002958
2959C API
2960-----
2961
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002962- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2963
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002964- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2965 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2966 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2967
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002968- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2969 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002970
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002971 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2972 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2973 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002974
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002975- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002976 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2977
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002978- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2979 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2980 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002981
2982New platforms
2983-------------
2984
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002985None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002986
2987Tests
2988-----
2989
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002990- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2991 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002992
2993Windows
2994-------
2995
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002996- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2997 function.
2998
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002999- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3000 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003001
3002Mac
3003---
3004
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003005- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3006 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003007
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003008- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3009 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003010
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003011- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3012 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3013 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003014
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003015- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003016 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3017 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003018
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003019- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3020 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003021
3022
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003023What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3024=================================
3025
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003026*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003027
3028Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003029-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003030
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003031- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3032 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3033 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3034
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003035- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3036 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3037 (SF patch #664376.)
3038
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003039- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3040 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3041 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3042 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3043 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3044 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003045 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003046
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003047- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3048 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3049 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3050 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003051 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003052
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003053- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3054 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3055 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3056 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3057 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3058 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3059 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3060 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3061 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3062 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3063 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3064
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003065- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3066 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3067 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3068 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3069 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3070 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3071
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003072- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3073 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3074
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003075- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3076 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3077 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3078 case.)
3079
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003080- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3081 passed as unicode strings.
3082
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003083- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3084 See SF bug #683467.
3085
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003086- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3087 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3088
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003089- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3090
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003091- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3092
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003093- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3094 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3095 arguments.
3096
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003097- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3098 See SF bug #667147.
3099
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003100- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003101 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003102 See SF bug #676155.
3103
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003104- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003105 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003106 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3107 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3108 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3109 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3110 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3111 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003112
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003113Extension modules
3114-----------------
3115
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003116- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3117 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3118 tp_as_number pointer.
3119
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003120- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3121 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3122 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3123 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3124 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3125
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003126- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3127
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003128- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3129
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003130- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003131 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003132 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3133 patch #678531.)
3134
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003135- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3136 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3137
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003138- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3139 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3140
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003141- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3142
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003143- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3144 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3145 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3146
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003147- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3148
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003149- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3150 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3151
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003152- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003153
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003154- datetime changes:
3155
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003156 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3157
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003158 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3159 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3160 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3161 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3162 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3163 now.
3164
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003165 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003166 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3167 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003168
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003169 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003170 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003171 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3172 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3173 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3174 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003175
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003176 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3177 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3178 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003179 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3180
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003181 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3182 by a later example coded by Guido.
3183
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003184 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003185 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3186 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3187 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003188 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3189 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3190
3191 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3192 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3193 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3194 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3195 tzinfo subclass instance.
3196
3197 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3198 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3199 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3200 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3201 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3202 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3203 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3204 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003205
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003206 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3207 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3208 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3209 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3210 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003211 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3212
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003213 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003214
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003215 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3216 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3217 as a naive datetime object.
3218
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003219 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3220 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3221 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3222
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003223 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3224 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3225 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3226 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3227 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3228 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3229 comparison.
3230
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003231 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3232 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3233 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3234 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003235 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003236
3237 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003238
3239 and ::
3240
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003241 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3242
3243 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3244 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3245 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3246 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3247
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003248 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3249 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3250 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3251 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3252 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3253
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003254 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3255 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003256 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3257 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003258
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003259Library
3260-------
3261
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003262- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3263 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3264
3265- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3266 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3267 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3268 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3269 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3270 See PEP 307 for details.
3271
3272- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3273 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3274
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003275- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3276 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003277 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003278 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3279 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003280 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003281
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003282- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3283 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3284
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003285- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3286 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3287 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3288
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003289- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3290
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003291- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3292 exception.
3293
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003294- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3295 class.
3296
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003297- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3298 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3299 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3300
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003301- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3302 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3303
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003304- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003305 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3306 See SF bug #659228.
3307
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003308- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3309 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3310 See SF patch #651082.
3311
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003312- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003313
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003314- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3315 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3316
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003317- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003318 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003319
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003320- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3321 DOS paths from other platforms.
3322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003323Tools/Demos
3324-----------
3325
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003326- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3327 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3328 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3329 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3330 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3331 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3332 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3333 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3334 example:
3335
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003336 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3337 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003338
3339 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3340
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003341
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003342Build
3343-----
3344
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003345- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3346 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3347 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003348 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3349
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003350 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3351
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003352- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3353 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3354 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3355 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3356 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3357 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3358 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3359 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3360 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3361
3362- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3363 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3364 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3365 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3366
3367- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3368 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3369
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003370C API
3371-----
3372
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003373- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3374 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003375
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003376- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3377 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3378 tp_as_number pointer.
3379
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003380- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3381 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3382 (SF #681367)
3383
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003384- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3385 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3386 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3387 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003388
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003389Tests
3390-----
3391
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003392- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003393 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3394 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3395 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3396 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3397 pydoc.)
3398
3399- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3400
3401- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003403Windows
3404-------
3405
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003406- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3407 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3408 time).
3409
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003410- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3411 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3412
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003413- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3414 release without strong cryptography.
3415
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003416- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003417 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003418
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003419- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3420 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3421
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003422Mac
3423---
3424
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003425- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3426 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003427
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003428- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3429 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3430 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003431
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003432- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3433 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003434
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003435- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3436 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3437 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3438 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003439
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003440- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003441 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3442 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3443 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003444
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003445
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003446What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003447=================================
3448
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003449*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003451Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003453
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003454- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3455
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003456- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3457 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003458 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003459 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003460 a different meaning than before.
3461
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003462- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003463 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003464 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003465
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003466- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003467 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003468 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003469
3470- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3471 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3472 and deallocation.
3473
3474- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3475 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3476
3477- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3478 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3479 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3480 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3481 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3482
3483- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3484 now detected by the garbage collector.
3485
3486- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3487 [SF bug 519621]
3488
3489- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3490 identifier.
3491
3492- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3493 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3494 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3495 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3496 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3497 [SF bug 563060]
3498
3499- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3500 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3501 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3502 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3503 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3504
3505- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3506 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3507 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3508
3509- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3510
3511- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3512 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3513 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3514 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3515 state of the slots would be lost.)
3516
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003517Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003519
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003520- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003521 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3522 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3523 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3524 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003525 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3526 Jython 2.1.
3527
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003528- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003529 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003530 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3531 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3532 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3533 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3534 these, see PEP 302.
3535
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003536- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3537 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3538 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3539
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003540- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3541 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3542 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3543
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003544- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3545 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3546 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3547
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003548- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3549 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3550 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3551 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3552 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3553 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3554 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3555 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3556 releases or implementations.
3557
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003558- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003559 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3560 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003561
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003562- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3563 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3564
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003565- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3566 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3567 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3568
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003569- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3570 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3571
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003572- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3573 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003574 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3575 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003576
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003577- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3578 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3579 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3580 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3581 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3582
3583 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3584 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3585 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3586 pattern.
3587
3588 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3589 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3590 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3591 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3592
3593 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3594 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3595 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3596 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3597 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3598 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3599
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003600- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3601 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3602 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3603 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3604 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3605 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3606 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3607 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003608
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003609- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3610 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3611 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3612 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3613 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003614 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3615 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3616 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3617 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3618 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3619 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3620 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003621
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003622- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3623 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3624
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003625- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3626 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3627 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3628 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3629 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3630 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3631 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3632 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3633 to Zack Weinberg!
3634
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003635- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3636 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3637 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3638 type. This has been fixed now.
3639
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003640- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3641 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3642 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3643
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003644- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3645 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3646 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3647 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3648 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3649 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3650 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3651 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003652 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003653
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003654- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3655 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3656 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003657
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003658- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3659 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3660 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3661 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3662 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3663 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3664 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3665 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003666 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003667 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3668 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3669
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003670- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3671 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3672 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3673 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3674 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3675 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3676 this.)
3677
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003678- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3679 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003680 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003681 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003682 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3683 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003684 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3685 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003686
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003687- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3688 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3689 currently running.
3690
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003691- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3692 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3693 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3694 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3695
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003696- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3697 as directory names.
3698
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003699- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3700 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3701
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003702- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3703 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3704
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003705- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003706 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3707 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003708
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003709- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3710 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3711 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3712 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3713 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3714
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003715- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3716 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3717 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3718 removed.
3719
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003720- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3721 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3722 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3723
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003724- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3725 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3726 to __debug__.
3727
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003728- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3729 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3730 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3731
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003732- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3733 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3734 deprecated now.
3735
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003736- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3737 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3738 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003739
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003740- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3741 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3742 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3743 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3744 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003745
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003746- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3747 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3748
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003749- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3750 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3751 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003752 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003753 is backward compatible.
3754
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003755- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3756 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3757 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3758 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3759 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3760
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003761- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3762 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3763 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3764 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3765 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3766 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003767
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003768- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3769 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3770
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003771- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3772 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3773
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003774- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3775 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3776 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3777 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3778 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3779
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003780- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3781 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3782 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3783
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003784- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003785 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3786
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003787- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3788 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3789 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003790
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003791- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3792 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3793
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003794- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3795 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3796 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3797
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003798- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3799
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003800Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003802
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003803- Added three operators to the operator module:
3804 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3805 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3806 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3807
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003808- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3809
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003810- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3811 archives.
3812
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003813- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3814 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3815 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3816
3817 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3818
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003819- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3820 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3821 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003822 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003823
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003824- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3825 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3826 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3827 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003828 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3829 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3830 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3831 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003832
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003833- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3834 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003835
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003836- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3837
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003838- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3839 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3840
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003841- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3842 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3843 supported.
3844
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003845- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3846
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003847- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3848 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003849
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003850- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3851 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3852
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003853- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3854
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003855- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3856 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3857
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003858- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3859 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3860 functions but callable type objects.
3861
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003862- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003863 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003864 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003865
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003866- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3867 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003868
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003869- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3870 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003871
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003872- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3873 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3874 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3875 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3876
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003877- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3878 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003879
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003880- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3881 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3882 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3883 and __imul__.
3884
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003885- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003886 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3887 is called.
3888
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003889- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3890 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3891 interpreter was compiled.
3892
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003893- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3894 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3895 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003896 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003897 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3898 1, not 2.
3899
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003900- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3901 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3902 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3903 limit.
3904
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003905- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3906 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3907 bug #623464.
3908
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003909- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3910 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3911 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3912 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3913
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003914Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003916
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003917- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3918
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003919- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3920 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3921 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3922 with Python 2.3a2.
3923
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003924- os.path exposes getctime.
3925
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003926- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003927 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003928 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003929 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003930 unit tests of floating point results.
3931
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003932- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3933 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3934 has been increased.
3935
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003936- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3937 executed.
3938
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003939- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3940 postinstallation script.
3941
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003942- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3943 test the current module.
3944
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003945- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003946 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3947 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3948 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3949 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3950
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003951- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003952 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003953 Ward's Optik package.
3954
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003955- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3956 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3957 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3958 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3959
3960- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3961 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003962 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003963
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003964- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3965 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3966 shelf are binary pickles.
3967
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003968- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3969 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3970
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003971- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3972 modules are iterators now.
3973
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003974- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3975 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3976 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3977 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3978 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3979 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003980
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003981- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3982 with their entity value.
3983
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003984- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3985
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003986- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3987 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003988
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003989- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3990 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003991 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003992
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003993- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3994 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3995 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3996 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3997 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3998 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3999 main():
4000
4001 import locale
4002 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4003
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004004- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4005 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4006
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004007- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4008 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4009 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4010 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4011 to the new standard.
4012
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004013- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4014 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4015 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4016 an extension to the database.
4017
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004018- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4019 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4020 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4021 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004022 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004023
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004024- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004025 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004026
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004027- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4028 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4029 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4030 bounded integers.
4031
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004032- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4033 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4034 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4035 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4036 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4037 in existence.
4038
4039 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4040 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4041 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4042 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4043 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4044 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4045
4046 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4047 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4048 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4049 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4050
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004051- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4052 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4053 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4054
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004055- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4056
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004057- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4058 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4059 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4060 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4061
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004062- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4063 argument.
4064
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004065- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4066 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4067 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4068 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4069 [SF patch 560794].
4070
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004071- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4072 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4073 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004074 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4075 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4076 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004077
4078- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4079 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004080
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004081- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4082 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4083 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4084 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004085
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004086- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4087 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4088 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4089 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4090 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4091
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004092- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004093
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004094- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4095
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004096- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4097 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4098 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4099 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4100 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4101 identical to None.
4102
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004103- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4104 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4105 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4106 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4107 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4108 results now.
4109
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004110- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4111 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4112
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004113- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4114 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4115 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4116 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4117 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4118 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4119 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4120 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4121
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004122- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4123
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004124- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4125 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4126
4127- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4128 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4129 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4130 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4131 and other systems.
4132
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004133- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4134 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4135 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4136 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 +00004137 work well with these.
4138
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004139- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4140
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004141- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004142 connections.
4143
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004144- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4145 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4146 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4147
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004148- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4149 sets
4150
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004151- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4152 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4153 name.
4154
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004155- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4156 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4157 passed in.
4158
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004159- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004160 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004161 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4162 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004163
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004164- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4165
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004166- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4167
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004168- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4169 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4170 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4171
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004172- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4173 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4174 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4175 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004176 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004177
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004178- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004179 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004180 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004181
4182- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4183 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4184 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4185
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004186- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004187 the value of its expression argument.
4188
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004189- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4190 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4191 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4192
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004193- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4194 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4195 skipstone browser was included.
4196
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004197- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4198 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4199
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004202
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004203- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4204 names in addition to accepting file names.
4205
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004206- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4207 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4208 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4209 still used and useful.)
4210
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004211- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4212 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4213 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4214 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004215
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004216- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4217 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4218 the generated binary.
4219
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004220Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004222
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004223- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4224
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004225- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4226 except in the hands of experts.
4227
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004228- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004229 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4230 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4231 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004232
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004233- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4234 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4235 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4236 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4237 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4238 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4239 builds.
4240
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004241- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4242 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4243 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4244 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4245 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4246 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4247 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4248 new type.
4249
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004250- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004251
4252 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4253 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4254 positive infinities.
4255
4256 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4257 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4258 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4259 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4260 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4261 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4262 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4263
4264 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4265
4266 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4267
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004268- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4269 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4270 size of the executable.
4271
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004272- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4273 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4274 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4275 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004276
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004277- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4278
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004279- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4280 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4281 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004282
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004283- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4284 well as Unix.
4285
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004286- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4287 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4288 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4289 modules in the README file for details.
4290
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004293
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004294- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4295 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004296 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004297 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004298 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004299
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004300- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4301 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4302 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4303 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4304 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4305 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004306 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004307 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4308 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4309 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4310 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4311 aligned.)
4312
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004313- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4314 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4315 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4316
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004317- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4318 level.
4319
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004320- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4321 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4322 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4323 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4324 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4325
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004326- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4327 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4328 code.
4329
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004330- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4331 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4332 adjusting for negative indices.
4333
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004334- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4335 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4336 object.
4337
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004338- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4339 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4340 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4341
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004342- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4343 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004344
4345- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4346
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004347- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4348 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4349 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4350 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4351
4352- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4353
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004354- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004355
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004356- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004357 without going through the buffer API.
4358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004360
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004361- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4362 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4363 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4364 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4365
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004366- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4367 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4368
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004369- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004370 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4371
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004372New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004374
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004375- OpenVMS is now supported.
4376
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004377- AtheOS is now supported.
4378
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004379- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4380
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004381- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4382
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004383Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----
4385
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004386- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4387 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4388 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004389
4390Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004392
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004393- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4394 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4395 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4396 bugs.
4397 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004398 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004399 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4400 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004401 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004402
4403- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004404 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004405
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004406- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4407 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4408
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004409- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4410 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004411 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004412 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4413
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004414- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4415 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4416 use files" uninstall option).
4417
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004418- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4419
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004420- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4421 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4422
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004423- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4424 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4425 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4426
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004427- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4428 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4429 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4430 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4431 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004432 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4433 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4434 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004435
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004436- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004437 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004438 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4439 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4440 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4441 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4442 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4443 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4444 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4445 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4446 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4447 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4448 work around.
4449
4450- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4451 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4452 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4453 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4454 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4455 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4456 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4457 specified with O_CREAT too).
4458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004459Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460----
4461
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004462- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004463
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004464- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4465 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4466 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4467
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004468- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4469 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4470 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4471
4472- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4473 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4474 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4475 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4476 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4477 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4478 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4479 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004480
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004481- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4482 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4483 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004484
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004485- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4486 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4487 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4488 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4489 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004490
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004491- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4492 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4493 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004494
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004495- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4496 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004497
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004498- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4499 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4500 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4501 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4502 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004503
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004504- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4505 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4506 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4507
4508- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4509 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4510 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004511
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004512- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4513 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4514 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4515 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004516 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004517
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004518- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4519 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004520
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004521- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4522 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004523
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004524- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004525 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004526 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4527 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004528
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004529
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004530What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004531===============================
4532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4534
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004537
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004538- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4539 with a custom metaclass.
4540
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004541Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004543
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004544- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4545 are proxies.
4546
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004547Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004549
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004550- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4551 very short strings.
4552
4553- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4554 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4555 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4556 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4557 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4558
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004559Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004561
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004562- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4563 close or delete time).
4564
4565- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4566 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4567
4568- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4569
4570- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004571 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004572
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004573Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004575
4576Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004578
4579C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004581
4582New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004584
4585Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004587
4588Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004590
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004591- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4592
4593- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4594 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4595
4596- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4597 deleted at process exit time.
4598
4599- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4600 in backslash.
4601
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004602Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004604
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004605- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4606 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4607 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4608
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004609
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004610What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004611===========================
4612
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4614
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004615Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004617
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004618- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4619 been extensively updated. See
4620
4621 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4622
4623 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4624
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004625- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4626 deleted!
4627
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004628- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4629 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4630 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4631 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4632 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4633
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004634- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4635
4636 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4637 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4638
4639 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4640 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4641 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4642 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4643 supported anyway.
4644
4645 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4646 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4647
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004648- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4649 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4650 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4651 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4652 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004653
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004654- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4655 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4656 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4657
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004658Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004660
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004661- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4662 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4663 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4664 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4665 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4666 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004667 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4668 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4669 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4670 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004671
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004672- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4673 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4674 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4675
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004678
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004679- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4680
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004681Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004684- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4685 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4686 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4687 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4688 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4689 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4690
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004691- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4692
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004693- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4694
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004695- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4696
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004697- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4698 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4699 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4700
4701- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4702
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004703Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004705
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004706- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4707 off a search on Google.
4708
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004709Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004711
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004712- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4713 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4714 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4715 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4716 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4717 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4718 other platforms should do likewise.
4719
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004720- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4721 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4722 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4723
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004724C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004726
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004727- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4728 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4729 producing key-value pairs.
4730
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004731- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004732 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004733 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4734 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4735 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4736 previously went unchallenged.
4737
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004740
4741Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004743
4744Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004746
4747Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004749
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004750- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4751 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004752
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004753- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4754 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4755 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4756 home.
4757
4758
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004759What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004760===========================
4761
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4763
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004764Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004766
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004767- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4768 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004769
4770 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004771 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004772
4773 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4774 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004775 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004776 This needs to be documented.
4777
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004778- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4779 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4780
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004781- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4782 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4783 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4784
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004785- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4786 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4787
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004788- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4789 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4790 class forbids it).
4791
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004792- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4793 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4794 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4795
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004796- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4797
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004798Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004800
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004801- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4802 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004803 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004804
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004805- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4806 (like 1 + '').
4807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004810
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004811- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4812 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4813 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4814 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004815 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004816 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4817
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004818- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4819 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4820 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4821 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4822
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004823- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4824 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004825 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4826 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4827 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004828
4829- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4830 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004831
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004832- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4833 bytes on its input.
4834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004837
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004838- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004839 convenience function.
4840
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004841- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4842 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4843 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004844 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4845 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4846 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4847 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4848 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4849 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004850
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004851- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4852 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4853 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4854 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4855
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004856- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4857 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4858 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4859
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004860- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4861 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4862 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4863 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4864
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004865- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4866 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004868 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4869 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4870 new -l and -e options.
4871
4872- statcache is now deprecated.
4873
4874- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4875 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004877 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4878 time properly taken into account.
4879
4880- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4881 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4882 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4883 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4884
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004885Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004887
4888Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004890
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004891- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4892 is built with libdb3 if available.
4893
4894- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4895
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004898
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004899- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4900 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4901 PySequence_Size().
4902
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004903- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4904
4905- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4906 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4907 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4908
4909- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4910 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4911
4912- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4913 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4914
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004915New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004917
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004918- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4919 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4920
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004921- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4922 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4923
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004924- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4925
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004926Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004928
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004929- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4930 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4931
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004932Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004935Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004937
4938- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4939 removed completely in the next release.
4940
4941- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4942 OSX.
4943
4944- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4945 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4946
4947- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4948
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004949
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004950What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004951===========================
4952
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4954
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004955Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004957
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004958- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004959 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004960 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004961 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4962 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004963 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4964 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004965 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4966 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004967
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004968- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4969 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4970
4971- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4972 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4973
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004974Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004976
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004977- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4978 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4979 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4980 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4981 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4982 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4983 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4984 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4985
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004986- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4987 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4988 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4989 example).
4990
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004991- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004992 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004993 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004994 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004995
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004996- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4997 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4998 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004999 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005000
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005001- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5002 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5003 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5004 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5005 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5006 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5007
5008 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5009
5010 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5011
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005012Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005014
5015- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5016
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005017- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5018
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005019- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5020 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005021
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005022- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5023 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5024 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5025 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5026 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5027 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005028 attributes.
5029
5030- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5031 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5032 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005033
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005034- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5035 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5036 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005037
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005038- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5039 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5040 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005041 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5042 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5043
5044- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5045 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005046
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005047Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005049
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005050- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5051 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5052
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005053- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5054 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5055 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5056 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5057
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005058- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5059 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5060 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5061 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5062
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005063 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5064 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5065 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5066 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5067 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5068 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5069 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5070 without losing information).
5071
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005072- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005073 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5074 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5075 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5076 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5077 module).
5078
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005079 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005080 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5081 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5082 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5083 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005084
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005085- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005086 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5087 encoding.
5088
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005089- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5090 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5091
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005092- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005093 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5094
5095- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5096 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5097 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5098 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5099
5100- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5101
5102- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5103 ON, and OFF.
5104
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005105- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5106 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5107
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005108Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005110
5111- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5112 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5113 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005114
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005115- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5116 been added: -X and -E.
5117
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005118Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005120
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005121- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5122 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5123
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005124C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005126
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005127- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5128 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5129 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5130 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5131 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5132
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005133- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5134 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5135 as long) arguments.
5136
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005137- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5138 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5139 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5140 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5141 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5142 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5143
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005144- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5145 input.
5146
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005147New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005149
5150Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005152
5153Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005155
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005156- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5157 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5158 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5159
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005160- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5161 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5162 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005163 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5166 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5167 import signal
5168 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005169
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005171 while 1:
5172 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005174 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5175 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5176 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5177 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005178
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005179
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005180What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5181===========================
5182
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5184
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005185Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005187
5188- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5189 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5190 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5191
5192- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5193 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5194 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5195 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5196 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5197 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5198 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005199
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005200- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005201 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005202 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5203 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5204 associate a docstring with a property.
5205
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005206- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5207 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5208 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5209 other built-in object types.
5210
5211- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5212 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5213 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5214 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5215 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5216
5217- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5218 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5219
5220- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5221 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005222 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005223 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5224 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5225 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5226 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5227 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5228
5229- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5230 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5231 class.
5232
5233- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5234 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5235 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5236 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5237
5238- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5239 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5240 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5241 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5242
5243- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5244 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5245
5246- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5247 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5248 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5249 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5250 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005251 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005252 with the same value as s.
5253
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005254- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5255
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005256Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005258
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005259- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5260
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005261- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5262 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5263 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5264 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5265 objects.
5266
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005267- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5268 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005269 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5270 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5271
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005272- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5273 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5274 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005276Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005278
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005279- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5280 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5281 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5282 by the instances.
5283
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005284- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5285 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5286 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5287
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005288- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5289 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5290 before the entire comparison is complete.
5291
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005292- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5293 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5294 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5295
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005296- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5297 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5298 getwriter().
5299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005300- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5301 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5302
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005303- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005304 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5305 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5306
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005307- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5308 iterable object.
5309
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005310- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5311 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005312
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005313- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5314 authentication.
5315
5316- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5317 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005318
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005319- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005320 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5321 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5322 a sample driver.)
5323
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005324Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005327- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5328 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5329 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5330 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5331 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5332 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5333 kernel has large file support.
5334
5335- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5336 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5337 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5338 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5339 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5340
5341- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5342 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5343 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5344
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005345C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005347
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005348- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5349 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5350
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005351New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005352-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005353
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005354- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5355 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5356
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005357Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005359
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005360- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5361 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5362 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5363 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5364 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5365
5366- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5367 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5368 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5369 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5370
5371- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5372 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5373
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005374Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005376
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005377- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005378 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5379 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005380
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005381
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005382What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5383===========================
5384
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5386
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005387Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005388----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005389
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005390- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5391 big to represent as a C double.
5392
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005393- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5394 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5395 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5396 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5397 restriction).
5398
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005399- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5400 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5401 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5402 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5403 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5404
5405 >>> dir([])
5406 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5407 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5408 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5409 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5410 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5411 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5412 'reverse', 'sort']
5413
5414 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5415
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005416- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005417 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5418 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5419 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5420 OverflowError exception.
5421
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005422- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005423 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005424 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5425 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5426 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5427 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5428 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005429 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5431 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5432
5433 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5434 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5435 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5436 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005437
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005438- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005439 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5440 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5441 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5442 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5443 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5444 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5445 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5446 once it is created.
5447
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005448- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5449 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5450 (key, value) pairs.
5451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005452- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005453 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5454 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5455
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005456- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5457 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5458 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5459 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5460 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005461
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005462- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005463 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5464 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5465
5466 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5467
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005468- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005469 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5470
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005471Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005472-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005473
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005474- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005475 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5476 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005477
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005478- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5479 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5480 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5481 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5482 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5483 in this area anymore).
5484
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005485- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5486 threading.Timer.
5487
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005488- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5489 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5490
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005491- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005492 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5493
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005494- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005495 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5496 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5497 converted to Python longs.
5498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005499- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005500 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5501
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005502- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5503 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5504 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005506Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005508
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005509- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5510 division operators as per PEP 238.
5511
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005512Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005513-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005514
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005515- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5516 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5517 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5518 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5519
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005520C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005522
5523- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005524
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005525- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5526 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005527 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005529 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5530 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005531 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005532 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005534- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005535 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5536 module:
5537
5538 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005539
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005540 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5541 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005542
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005543 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5544 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005545
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005546 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5547
5548 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5549
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005550- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005551 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5552 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5553 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005554
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005555New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005558- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5559 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5560 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5561 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5562 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005563
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005564Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005565-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005566
5567Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005569
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005570- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5571 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5572 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5573 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005574 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5575 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5576 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5577 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5578 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005579
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005580- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005581 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5582
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005583
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005584What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5585===========================
5586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005587*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5588
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005589Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005591
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005592- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5593 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5594
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005595- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5596 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5597 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005598
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005599- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5600 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5601 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5602 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005603
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005604- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5605
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005606- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005607
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005608Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005610
5611- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005612 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005613 the module docstring for details.
5614
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005615Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005616-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005617
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005618- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005619 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5620 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5621 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005622
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005623- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5624 Nick Mathewson.
5625
5626Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005627----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005628
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005629- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5630 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5631 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5632 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5633 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5634 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5635 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5636 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5637
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005638- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5639 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5640 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5641 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5642
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005643- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5644 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5645 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5646 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5647 come a long way).
5648
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005649- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5650 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5651 write filters for these warnings).
5652
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005653- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5654 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5655 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5656 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5657 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5658
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005659- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5660 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5661 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5662 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5663 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5664 older distribution.
5665
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005668
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005669- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5670 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005671 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005672
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005673- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5674 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5675 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5676
5677- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5678
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005679- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5680
5681- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5682
5683- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005685- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005686
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005687- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5688
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005689New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005690-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005691
5692C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005693-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005694
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005695- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5696 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5697 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5698 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5699 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5700 against buffer overruns.
5701
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005702- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005703 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5704 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005705 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5706 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5707 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5708
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005709- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5710 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5711 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5712 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5713 deprecated.
5714
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005715Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005716-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005717
5718- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5719 relevant is found.
5720
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005721
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005722What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005723===========================
5724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005725*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5726
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005727Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005728----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005729
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005730- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5731 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5732 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5733 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5734 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5735 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5736 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5737 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005738 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005739 repaired.
5740
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005741- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005742 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005743 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5744 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5745 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5746 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5747 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5748 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5749 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5750 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5751
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005752- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5753 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5754 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5755 leading BMO character).
5756
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005757- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5758 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5759 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5760
5761 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5762 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5763 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005764
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005765 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5766 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5767 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5768 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5769 for various simple to use conversions.
5770
5771 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5772 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005774 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5775 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5776 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5777 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5778 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5779 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5780 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5781 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5782 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5783 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5784 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5785 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5786 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5787 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5788 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005789
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005790- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5791 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5792 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005793 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005794 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005795
5796 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005797 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5798 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5799 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5800 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5801 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005802 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5803 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005804
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005805 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5806 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5807 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005808 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005809
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005810- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5811 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5812 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5813 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5814 floating arithmetic,
5815
5816 x = 9007199254740992.0
5817 print long(x)
5818
5819 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5820 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5821 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5822 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5823 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5824 functions are of good quality).
5825
5826 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5827 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5828 algorithms to break.
5829
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005830- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5831 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5832 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5833 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5834 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5835 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5836 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5837 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5838 order.
5839
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005840- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5841 operation along the most common code paths.
5842
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005843- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5844 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5845
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005846- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5847 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5848 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5849 {}.update(UserDict())
5850
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005851- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5852 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5853 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5854 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5855 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5856 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5857 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5858 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5859
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005860- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005861 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005862
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005863 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005864 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5865 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005866 join() method of strings
5867 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005868 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5869 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005870 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005871 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005872
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005873- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5874 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5875
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005876- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5877 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5878
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005879- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5880 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5881 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5882 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5883
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005884- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5885 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005886 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005887 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5888 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005889
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005890- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5891
5892
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005894-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005895
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005896- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005897 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005898 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5899 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5900
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005901- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5902 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5903
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005904- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5905 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5906 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5907 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5908
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005909- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5910 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5911 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5912
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005913- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5914
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005915- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5916
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005917- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5918 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5919 that are still imported into string.py).
5920
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005921- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5922
5923- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5924 Now it does.
5925
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005926- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5927
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005928- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5929 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5930 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5931 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5932 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005933 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5934 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005935
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005936- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5937 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5938 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5939 'help(object)'.
5940
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005941Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005942-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005943
5944- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005945 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005946 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5947 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5948
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005949- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005950 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5951 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005952
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005953C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005954-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005955
5956- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5957 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005958
5959----
5960
5961**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**