blob: e387e63f5b8bc75b97f11760759b78397a7d0b13 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000013- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
14 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
15
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000016- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
17
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000018- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
19 returning None.
20
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000021- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
22 ('\') with a specific error message.
23
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000024- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
25
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000026- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
27 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
28
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000029- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000030 an ferror() call.
31
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000032- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
33 list.sort().
34
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000035- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
36 (2+3) --> (5).
37
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000038- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
39
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000040- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
41 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000042
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000043- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
44 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
45 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
46
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000047Extension Modules
48-----------------
49
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000050- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
51
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000052- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
53 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
54
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000055- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
56 file size.
57
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000058- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
59
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000060- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
61 {remove_history,replace_history}
62
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000063- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
64 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000065
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000066- stat_float_times is now True.
67
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000068- array.array objects are now picklable.
69
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000070- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
71 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
72
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000073- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
74 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
75 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
76
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000077- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
78 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000079
80Library
81-------
82
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +000083- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
84 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
85
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +000086- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
87
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000088- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
89 to build.
90
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +000091- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
92 symbolic links on Windows.
93
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000094- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
95 profile.py if available.
96
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000097- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
98
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000099- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
100 in LWPCookieJar.
101
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000102- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
103
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000104- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
105
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000106- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
107
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000108- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
109
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000110- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
111
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000112- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
113
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000114- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
115
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000116- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
117
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000118- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
119 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
120 be exploited in various ways.
121
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000122- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
123
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000124- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
125
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000126- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
127
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000128- Enhancements to the csv module:
129
130 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
131 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
132 PEP 305.
133 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
134 reporting.
135 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
136 dictates.
137 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000138 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000139 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000140 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
141 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000142 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
143 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000144 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000145 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
146 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
147 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
148 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
149 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
150 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
151 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
152 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
153 without first creating a dialect class.
154 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
155 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
156 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000157 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000158 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
159 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000160 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
161 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
162 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
163 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000164 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
165 This has been fixed.
166
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000167- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
168 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
169 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
170 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
171
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000172- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
173
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000174- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
175 (Bug #951915).
176
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000177- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
178 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
179 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
180 encoding alias table
181
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000182- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
183
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000184- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
185 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
186
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000187- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
188
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000189- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
190
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000191- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
192
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000193- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
194
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000195- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
196
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000197- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
198 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
199 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
200
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000201- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000202 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000203
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000204- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
205 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
206 tokenizer with very long source lines.
207
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000208- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
209 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
210
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000211- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
212 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000213
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000214- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
215 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
216
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000217- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
218 correctly.
219
220
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000221Build
222-----
223
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000224- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
225 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
226
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000227- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
228 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
229 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
230 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
231 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
232 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
233 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
234 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
235
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000236- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
237 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
238 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
239 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
240
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000241
242C API
243-----
244
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000245- Removed PyRange_New().
246
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000247
248Tests
249-----
250
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000251- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000252
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000253
254Documentation
255-------------
256
257- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
258 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
259 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
260
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000261Mac
262---
263
264
265
266Tools/Demos
267-----------
268
269
270
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000271What's New in Python 2.4 final?
272===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000273
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000274*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000275
276Core and builtins
277-----------------
278
279- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
280 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
281 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
282
283
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000284What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
285==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000286
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000287*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000288
289Core and builtins
290-----------------
291
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000292- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
293 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
294 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
295
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000296
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000297Library
298-------
299
300- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
301 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
302 raised is re-raised.
303
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000304- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
305 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
306
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000307- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
308 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
309 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
310 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
311 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
312 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
313 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
314 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
315 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
316 by the slice are recomputed now.
317
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000318- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000319
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000320Build
321-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000322
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000323- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
324 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
325 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000326
327C API
328-----
329
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000330- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
331
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000332
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000333What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
334================================
335
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000336*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000337
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000338License
339-------
340
341The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
342is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
343changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
344Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
345intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
346durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
347the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
348License::
349
350 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
351
352says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
353to Python 2.1.1.
354
355The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
356License Version 2.
357
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000358Core and builtins
359-----------------
360
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000361- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
362 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
363 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
364 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
365 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
366 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
367 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
368 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
369 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
370 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
371
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000372- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000373
374Extension Modules
375-----------------
376
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000377- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
378 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
379 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
380 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000381
382Library
383-------
384
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000385- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
386 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
387 returned.
388
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000389- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
390
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000391- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
392 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
393
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000394- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
395
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000396- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
397 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000398
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000399- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
400
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000401- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
402
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000403- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000404 the source code is updated and reloaded.
405
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000406Build
407-----
408
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000409- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000410
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000411What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
412================================
413
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000414*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000415
416Core and builtins
417-----------------
418
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000419- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000420 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
421
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000422- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
423 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
424 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
425 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
426
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000427- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
428 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
429
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000430- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
431 constant.
432
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000433- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
434 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
435 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
436 large), and to anomalies such as
437 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
438 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
439 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
440 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000441
442Extension modules
443-----------------
444
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000445- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
446 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000447 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
448 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
449 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000450
451Library
452-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000453
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000454- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000455 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000456 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
457 --swig-cpp.
458
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000459- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
460 it is set.
461
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000462- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000463
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000464- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
465 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
466 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
467 Closes bug #1039270.
468
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000469- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000470
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000471 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000472 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
473 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
474 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
475 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
476 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
477 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
478 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
479 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
480 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
481 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
482 + Updates to documentation.
483
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000484- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
485 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
486 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
487 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
488
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000489- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000490
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000491- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
492 applications should use the getmember function.
493
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000494- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
495
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000496- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
497 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
498 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
499 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
500 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
501 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
502 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
503 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
504 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
505
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000506- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
507 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000508 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000509
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000510- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
511 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
512 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
513 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
514 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
515 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
516 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
517 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000518
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000519- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
520 the new public features (of which there are many).
521
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000522- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000523 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
524 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
525 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
526 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000527 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000528
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000529- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
530
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000531- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
532 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
533 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
534 options.
535
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000536- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
537 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
538 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
539 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
540 conditions under which non-string values work.
541
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000542Build
543-----
544
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000545- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
546 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
547 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
548
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000549- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
550 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
551 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
552 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
553 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000554
555C API
556-----
557
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000558- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
559 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
560
561- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
562
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000563- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
564 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
565 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
566 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
567 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
568 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
569 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
570 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
571 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
572
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000573- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
574
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000575- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
576 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
577 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000578
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000579Tests
580-----
581
582- test__locale ported to unittest
583
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000584Mac
585---
586
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000587- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
588 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
589 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000590
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000591Tools/Demos
592-----------
593
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000594- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
595 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
596 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
597 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
598 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000599
600
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000601What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
602=================================
603
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000604*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000605
606Core and builtins
607-----------------
608
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000609- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000610 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
611
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000612- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
613 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
614 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
615 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
616 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
617 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
618 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
619 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000620 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
621 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
622 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
623 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
624 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000625
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000626- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
627 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
628 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
629 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
630 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
631
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000632- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
633
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000634- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
635 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
636
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000637- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
638 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
639 modified the list.
640
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000641- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
642 functions is now writable.
643
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000644- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
645 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
646 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
647 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
648
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000649- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
650 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
651 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
652 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
653 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000654
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000655- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
656 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
657
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000658Extension modules
659-----------------
660
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000661- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
662
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000663- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
664 data.
665
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000666- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
667 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
668 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
669 supposed to have been truncated away.
670
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000671- Added socket.socketpair().
672
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000673- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
674 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
675
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000676- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000677 versions of Python, have now been removed.
678
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000679Library
680-------
681
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000682- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000683 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000684
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000685- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
686 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
687
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000688- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
689 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
690
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000691- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
692
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000693- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
694 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000695
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000696- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
697 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
698
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000699- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
700
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000701- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
702
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000703- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
704
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000705- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
706 Percivall.
707
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000708- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
709 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
710
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000711- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
712 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
713 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000714 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000715
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000716- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
717 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
718 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
719 and exponent.
720
721- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
722
723- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
724 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
725 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
726
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000727- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
728 to the readline module.
729
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000730- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000731 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
732 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000733
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000734- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
735 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
736 contains symlinks.
737
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000738- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
739 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
740
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000741- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
742 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
743 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
744
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000745- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
746 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
747 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
748 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
749 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
750 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
751 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
752 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
753 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
754 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
755 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
756 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
757 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
758
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000759- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
760
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000761Tools/Demos
762-----------
763
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000764- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
765 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
766
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000767- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
768
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000769Build
770-----
771
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000772- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
773 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
774 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
775 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
776 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
777 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
778 plans to do so.
779
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000780- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
781 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
782
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000783- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
784 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
785
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000786- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
787 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
788
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000789- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
790 GNU/k*BSD systems.
791
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000792- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
793 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
794
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000795C API
796-----
797
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000798..
799
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000800Documentation
801-------------
802
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000803- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
804 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
805
806- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
807 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
808 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000809
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000810New platforms
811-------------
812
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000813- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
814
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000815Tests
816-----
817
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000818..
819
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000820Windows
821-------
822
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000823- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
824 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
825 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
826 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
827 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
828 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
829 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
830 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
831 the problem.
832
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000833Mac
834---
835
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000836..
837
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000838
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000839What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
840=================================
841
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000842*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000843
844Core and builtins
845-----------------
846
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000847- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
848 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
849 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
850 sensitive code.
851
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000852- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000853 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000854
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000855 @staticmethod
856 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000857
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000858 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000859
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000860- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
861 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
862 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
863 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
864 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
865 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
866 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
867 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
868 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
869 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
870 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
871
872 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
873 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
874 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
875 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
876 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
877 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
878 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
879
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000880- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
881 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
882
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000883- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000884 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000885
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000886- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000887 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000888 which was missing for no apparent reason.
889
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000890- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000891 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
892 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
893
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000894- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
895 types that support garbage collection.
896
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000897- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
898
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000899- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
900 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
901 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
902 Jython.
903
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000904- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
905
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000906- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
907 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
908
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000909- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
910 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
911 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000912
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000913- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
914 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
915 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
916
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000917Extension modules
918-----------------
919
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000920- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
921
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000922Library
923-------
924
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000925- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
926 TIS-620
927
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000928- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
929 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
930 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
931 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
932 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
933 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
934 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
935 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
936 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
937 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
938
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000939- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
940
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000941- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
942 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
943 same as when the argument is omitted).
944 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
945
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000946- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
947
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000948- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
949 schemes are offered.
950
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000951- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
952
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000953- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
954 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
955 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
956
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000957- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
958
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000959- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
960 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
961
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000962- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
963 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
964 when dummy_threading is being used.
965
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000966- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
967 from a tarfile.
968
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000969- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000970 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000971
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000972- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
973 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
974 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
975 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
976
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000977- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
978 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
979
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000980- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
981 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
982 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
983 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
984 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
985 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
986 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
987 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
988 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
989 by some other method in progress).
990
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000991- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
992 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
993 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000994
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000995- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
996
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000997- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
998 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
999 AM Kuchling.
1000
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001001- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1002 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1003 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1004
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001005- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1006 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1007 instead of unsigned.
1008
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001009- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001010 no longer part of the public API.
1011
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001012- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1013 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1014 string methods of the same name).
1015
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001016- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001017 SF patch 945642.
1018
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001019- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1020
1021 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1022
1023 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1024 DocTestSuites.
1025
1026- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1027 that provide thread-local data.
1028
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001029- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1030 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1031
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001032- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1033
1034- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1035 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1036 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1037
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001038- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1039
1040 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1041 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1042 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001043
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001044 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1045 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1046 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1047 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1048
1049 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1050 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1051
1052 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1053 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1054 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1055 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1056
1057 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1058 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1059 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1060 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1061 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1062
1063 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1064 wrapping help output.
1065
1066 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1067 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1068 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001069
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001070C API
1071-----
1072
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001073- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1074 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1075 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1076 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1077 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1078 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1079 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1080 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1081 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1082 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1083 its visible semantics have not changed.
1084
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001085- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1086 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1087
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001088Documentation
1089-------------
1090
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001091- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001092
1093 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001094 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001095
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001096 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001097
1098 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1099
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001100- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001101
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001102Tests
1103-----
1104
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001105- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001106 platforms that use the Makefile.
1107
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001108- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1109 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1110 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1111
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001112
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001113What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1114=================================
1115
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001116*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001117
1118Core and builtins
1119-----------------
1120
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001121- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1122 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1123 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1124 objects now (one object instead of three).
1125
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001126- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1127 Windows DLLs.
1128
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001129- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1130 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001131
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001132- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1133 a new .pyc magic.
1134
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001135- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1136 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1137 be there.
1138
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001139- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1140 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1141 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1142
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001143- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1144 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1145 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1146
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001147- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1148
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001149- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1150 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1151 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001152
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001153- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1154 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1155
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001156- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1157
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001158- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001159 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001160
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001161- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1162
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001163- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1164
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001165- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1166 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1167
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001168- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1169 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1170 Fixes bug #858016 .
1171
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001172- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1173 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1174 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1175
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001176- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1177 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1178 improves their performance (about 35%).
1179
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001180- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1181 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1182 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1183
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001184- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1185 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1186 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1187 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1188
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001189- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1190 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1191 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1192 length is not known).
1193
1194- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1195 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001196 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1197 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001198 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1199
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001200- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1201 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1202
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001203- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1204 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1205 keyword arguments.
1206
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001207- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1208 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1209 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1210
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001211- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1212 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1213 cases.
1214
1215- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1216 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1217 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1218 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1219 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1220 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1221 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1222 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1223 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1224 a release build.
1225
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001226- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1227 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1228
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001229- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001230 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001231
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001232- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1233 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1234 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1235 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1236 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1237 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1238 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1239 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1240 destroyed.
1241
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001242- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1243 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1244 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1245 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1246 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1247 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1248 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1249 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1250
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001251- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1252 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1253 character other than a space.
1254
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001255- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1256 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1257 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1258 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1259 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1260 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1261 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1262 attributes with the same name.
1263
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001264- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1265 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1266 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1267 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1268 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1269 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1270 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1271 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1272 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1273 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1274 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1275 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1276 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1277 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001278
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001279- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1280 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1281 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1282 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1283 This has been repaired.
1284
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001285- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1286
1287- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1288
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001289- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1290 over a sequence.
1291
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001292- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001293 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001294
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001295- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1296
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001297- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1298 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1299 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1300 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1301 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1302 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1303 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1304 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1305
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001306- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1307 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1308 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1309
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001310- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1311 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1312 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1313 freelist.
1314
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001315- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1316 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1317
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001318- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1319 number.
1320
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001321- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1322 a TypeError exception.
1323
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001324- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1325 820195.
1326
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001327- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1328 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1329 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1330
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001331- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001332 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1333 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001334
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001335- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1336 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1337 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1338
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001339- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1340 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001341 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001342
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001343- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001344 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1345 the first call.
1346
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001347
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001348Extension modules
1349-----------------
1350
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001351- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1352 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1353
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001354- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1355 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1356 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1357 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1358 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1359 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1360 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001361
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001362- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1363
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001364- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1365
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001366- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1367 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1368
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001369- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1370 fewer false positives.
1371
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001372- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1373 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1374
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001375- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001376 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1377
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001378- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001379 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001380 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001381 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1382 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001383
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001384- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1385 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1386 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1387 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1388
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001389- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1390 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1391 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1392 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1393 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1394 #897625.
1395
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001396- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1397 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1398
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001399- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1400 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1401 and pops on either side of the deque.
1402
1403- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1404 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1405
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001406- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1407 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1408 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1409 other functions that expect a function argument.
1410
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001411- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1412
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001413- os.getsid was added.
1414
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001415- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1416 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1417 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1418
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001419- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1420
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001421- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1422
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001423- readline.clear_history was added.
1424
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001425- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1426
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001427- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1428
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001429- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1430
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001431- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1432
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001433- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1434
1435- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1436
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001437- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1438
1439- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1440
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001441- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1442 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1443 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1444
1445- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1446 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1447 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1448 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1449 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1450 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1451 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1452
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001453- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1454 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1455 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1456 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001457
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001458- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001459 iterators from a single iterable.
1460
1461- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1462 of raising a TypeError exception.
1463
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001464- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1465 as parameter.
1466
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001467Library
1468-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001469
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001470- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1471 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1472 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001473
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001474- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1475 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1476 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001477
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001478- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001479
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001480- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1481 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001482
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001483- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1484 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1485
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001486- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1487
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001488- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001489 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001490
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001491- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001492 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001493
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001494- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1495
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001496- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1497 on cygwin and mingw32.
1498
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001499- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1500
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001501- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1502 module.
1503
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001504- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1505 installation scheme for all platforms.
1506
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001507- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001508 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001509
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001510- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1511 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1512 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1513
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001514- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1515 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1516 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1517
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001518- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1519
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001520- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1521
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001522- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1523 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1524
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001525- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1526 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1527 type pattern with the same value exists.
1528
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001529- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1530 when run from the command prompt).
1531
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001532- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1533 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1534
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001535- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1536 default sort).
1537
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001538- Added global runctx function to profile module
1539
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001540- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1541
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001542- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1543
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001544- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1545
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001546- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001547 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1548 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1549 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1550 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1551 accordingly.
1552
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001553- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1554 decoding standards.
1555
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001556- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1557 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1558 called for all requests.
1559
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001560- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1561 they are passed to the compiler.
1562
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001563- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1564 indent, width and depth.
1565
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001566- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1567 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1568
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001569- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1570 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1571
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001572- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1573
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001574- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1575
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001576- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1577
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001578- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1579 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1580
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001581- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001582 for better performance.
1583
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001584- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001585
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001586- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1587 a string).
1588
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001589- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1590
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001591- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1592
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001593- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1594
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001595- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1596
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001597- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1598 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1599 list of fieldnames.
1600
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001601- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1602 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1603
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001604- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1605
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001606- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1607 empty lists.
1608
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001609- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1610 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1611 and shelves.
1612
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001613- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1614 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1615
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001616- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001617 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1618 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001619
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001620- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1621 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001622 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001623
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001624- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001625 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1626 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1627
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001628- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1629 and removed in Py2.4.
1630
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001631- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1632
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001633- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1634
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001635Tools/Demos
1636-----------
1637
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001638- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1639 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1640
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001641- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1642
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001643- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1644 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1645 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1646 destination in situations where both files are given.
1647
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001648- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1649 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1650 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1651 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1652
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001653- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1654
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001655- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1656 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1657 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1658 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1659 now.
1660
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001661- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1662 in effect
1663
1664- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1665 C-c C-h
1666
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001667- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1668 -d option was given.
1669
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001670Build
1671-----
1672
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001673- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1674 build under OS X.
1675
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001676- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1677 --enable-profiling.
1678
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001679- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1680 is configured --with-tsc.
1681
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001682- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1683 on AMD64.
1684
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001685- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1686 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1687
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001688- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1689 removed.
1690
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001691- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1692 supported (see PEP 11).
1693
1694- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1695
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001696- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1697
1698- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1699 (see PEP 11).
1700
1701- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1702 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1703
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001704C API
1705-----
1706
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001707- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1708 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1709 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1710
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001711- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1712 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1713 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1714 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1715
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001716- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1717 generator objects.
1718
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001719- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1720 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001721 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1722 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001723
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001724- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1725 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1726
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001727- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1728 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1729 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1730 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1731 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1732
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001733- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1734 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1735 about 10% faster.
1736
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001737- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1738 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1739
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001740- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1741 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1742 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1743 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1744
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001745Windows
1746-------
1747
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001748- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1749 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1750 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1751 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1752
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001753- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1754 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1755 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1756
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001757
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001758What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1759===============================
1760
1761*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1762
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001763IDLE
1764----
1765
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001766- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1767 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1768 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1769 context-menu actions.
1770
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001771- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1772 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1773 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1774 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1775 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1776 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1777 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1778 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1779 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1780
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001781
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001782What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1783=============================================
1784
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001785*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001786
1787Core and builtins
1788-----------------
1789
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001790- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001791 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001792 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1793
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001794Extension modules
1795-----------------
1796
1797- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1798 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1799 than once. This has been fixed.
1800
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001801- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1802 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1803 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1804 call.
1805
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001806- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1807
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001808Library
1809-------
1810
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001811- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1812 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1813
1814- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1815 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1816 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1817 restored.
1818
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001819IDLE
1820----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001821
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001822- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001823
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001824Build
1825-----
1826
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001827- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1828 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1829
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001830C API
1831-----
1832
1833Windows
1834-------
1835
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001836- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1837 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1838
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001839- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1840
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001841Mac
1842---
1843
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001844- Various fixes to pimp.
1845
1846- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1847
1848- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1849 more problems than it solves.
1850
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001851
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001852What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1853=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001854
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001855*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1856
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001857Core and builtins
1858-----------------
1859
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001860- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1861 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1862
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001863- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1864 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001865 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001866
1867- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1868 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1869 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001870 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001871
1872- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1873 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001874
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001875- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1876 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1877 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1878
1879- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001880 770247.
1881
1882- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001883
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001884Extension modules
1885-----------------
1886
1887- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1888 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1889
1890- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1891
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001892- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1893
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001894- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1895 contained within the _strptime module.
1896
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001897- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1898 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1899
1900- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001901 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1902
1903- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1904 the find_class attribute, if present.
1905
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001906- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001907
1908 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1909 (SF bug 763298).
1910
1911 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001912 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1913 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1914 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001915
1916 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1917
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001918Library
1919-------
1920
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001921- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1922
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001923- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1924 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1925 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1926 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1927 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1928 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1929 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1930 or Tester().
1931
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001932- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1933 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1934 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1935 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1936 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1937 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1938 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1939 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1940 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001941
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001942 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001943
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001944- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1945 weren't before was an oversight.
1946
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001947- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1948 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1949
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001950- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1951 when there are no lines.
1952
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001953- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1954 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1955
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001956- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1957 to child processes.
1958
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001959- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1960
1961- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1962
1963- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1964 xmlrpclib.
1965
1966- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1967 responses.
1968
1969- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1970 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1971
1972- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1973 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1974 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1975
1976- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1977 used as patterns.
1978
1979- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1980 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1981 than Tk 8.3.
1982
1983- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1984
1985- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001986
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001987Tools/Demos
1988-----------
1989
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001990- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1991
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001992- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1993
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001994- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001995
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001996Build
1997-----
1998
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001999- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2000
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002001- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2002
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002003- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2004 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002005
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002006- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2007 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2008 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002009
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002010C API
2011-----
2012
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002013- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2014 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2015
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002016Windows
2017-------
2018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002019- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2020 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2021 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2022 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2023 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2024 Python exception ::
2025
2026 thread.error: can't start new thread
2027
2028 is raised now.
2029
2030- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2031 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2032 instead of from DLL teardown.
2033
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002034Mac
2035---
2036
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002037- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002038 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002039 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2040 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2041 the executable in the bundle.
2042
2043- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002044
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002045- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2046
2047- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2048 on Panther.
2049
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002050What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2051================================
2052
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002053*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002054
2055Core and builtins
2056-----------------
2057
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002058- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2059 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2060 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2061 with the -i option.
2062
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002063- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2064 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2065
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002066- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2067 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2068
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002069- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2070 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2071 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2072 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2073 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2074 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2075 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2076 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2077 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2078 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2079 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2080 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2081 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002082
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002083- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2084 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2085 embedded in a lambda expression.
2086
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002087- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2088 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2089 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2090 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2091 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2092
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002093- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2094 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2095 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2096
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002097- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2098 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2099
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002100- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2101 It's writable again.
2102
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002103- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2104 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2105 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002106 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002107
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002108- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2109 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2110 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2111
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002112Extension modules
2113-----------------
2114
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002115- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2116 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2117
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002118- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2119 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2120 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2121 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2122
2123- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2124 collection.
2125
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002126- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2127 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2128 unique within a single program run.
2129
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002130- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2131 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2132
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002133- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2134 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2135
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002136- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2137 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002138
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002139- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2140
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002141- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2142 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2143
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002144- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2145 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2146 for many BSD-derived systems.
2147
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002149Library
2150-------
2151
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002152- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2153 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2154 primary ones:
2155
2156 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2157 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2158 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2159
2160 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2161 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2162 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2163 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2164 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2165 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2166
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002167- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2168 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2169 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2170 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2171 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2172 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2173 argument.
2174
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002175- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2176 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2177 in the archive.
2178
2179- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2180 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2181
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002182- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2183 569574).
2184
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002185- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2186 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2187 no more.
2188
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002189- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2190 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2191 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2192 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2193 code coverage.
2194
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002195- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2196 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2197 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002198 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2199 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002200
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002201- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2202 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2203 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002204 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002205
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002206- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2207
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002208- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2209 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2210 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2211 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2212
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002213- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2214 handling.
2215
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002216- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2217 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2218
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002219- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2220 in socket.py.
2221
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002222- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2223
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002224- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2225 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2226 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2227 opener with proxy support.
2228
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002229- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2230
2231- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2232
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002233Tools/Demos
2234-----------
2235
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002236- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2237
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002238- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2239
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002240- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2241 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002242
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002243- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2244 files.
2245
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002246Build
2247-----
2248
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002249- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002250 different root directory.
2251
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252C API
2253-----
2254
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002255- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2256 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2257 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2258 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2259 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2260 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2261 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2262 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2263 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2264 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2265
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002266- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2267 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2268 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2269 from Python.
2270
2271
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002272New platforms
2273-------------
2274
2275None this time.
2276
2277Tests
2278-----
2279
2280- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2281 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2282
2283Windows
2284-------
2285
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002286- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2287
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002288- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2289 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2290 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2291 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2292 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2293 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2294 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2295 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2296 that's what it's for.
2297
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002298Mac
2299---
2300
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002301- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2302 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2303 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2304 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002305- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2306 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2307- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002308
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002309SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2310------------------------------------
2311
2312430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2313598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2314622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2315661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2316683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2317697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2318713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2319724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2320727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2321729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2322730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2323731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2324732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2325733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2326735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2327740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2328744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2329745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2330747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2331749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2332751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2333753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2334755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2335757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2336760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2337
2338
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002339What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2340================================
2341
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002342*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002343
2344Core and builtins
2345-----------------
2346
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002347- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2348 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2349
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002350- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2351 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2352 and cannot be strings).
2353
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002354- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2355 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2356 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2357 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2358
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002359- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2360 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2361 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2362 Python itself.
2363
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002364- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2365 the referenced object, if it has one.
2366
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002367- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2368 the thread started at
2369 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2370
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002371- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2372 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2373 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2374 placed on a list index.
2375
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002376- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2377 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2378 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2379 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2380
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002381- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2382 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2383 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2384 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2385 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2386 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2387 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2388
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002389- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2390 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2391 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2392 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2393 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2394
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002395- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2396 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002397
2398- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2399 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2400 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2401 #693195.)
2402
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002403- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2404 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002405
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002406- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002407 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002408 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2409 interpreter executions, would fail.
2410
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002411- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002412 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002413 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002414
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002415Extension modules
2416-----------------
2417
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002418- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2419 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2420 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2421 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2422
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002423- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2424 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2425
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002426- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2427 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2428 and Greg Chapman.)
2429
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002430- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2431 recursively.
2432
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002433- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002434 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2435 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2436 leaks.
2437
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002438- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2439
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002440- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2441 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2442 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2443 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2444 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2445 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2446 #705836.
2447
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002448- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002449 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2450
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002451- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2452 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2453 See SF bug #692416.
2454
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002455- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2456 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2457
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002458- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2459 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2460 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002461
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002462- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002463 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2464 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2465
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002466- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2467 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2468 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2469 timeouts to work properly.
2470
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002471Library
2472-------
2473
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002474- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2475 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2476 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2477 future release.
2478
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002479- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2480 for querying platform dependent features.
2481
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002482- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002483
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002484- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2485 pickle protocol versions.
2486
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002487- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2488 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2489 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2490
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002491- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2492
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002493- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2494 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2495 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2496 modules.
2497
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002498- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2499 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2500 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2501
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002502- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2503 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2504
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002505- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2506 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2507 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2508
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002509- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002510 MS Office extensions.
2511
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002512- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2513 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2514
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002515- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2516 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2517
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002518- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2519 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2520 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2521 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2522 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2523 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2524
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002525- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2526 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2527 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002528
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002529- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2530 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2531 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2532
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002533- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2534
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002535- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2536 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2537 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2538
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002539Tools/Demos
2540-----------
2541
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002542- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2543 See the module docstring for details.
2544
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545Build
2546-----
2547
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002548- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2549 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002550
2551C API
2552-----
2553
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002554- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2555
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002556- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2557 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2558 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2559
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002560- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2561 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002562
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002563 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2564 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2565 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002566
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002567- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002568 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2569
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002570- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2571 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2572 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002573
2574New platforms
2575-------------
2576
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002577None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002578
2579Tests
2580-----
2581
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002582- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2583 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002584
2585Windows
2586-------
2587
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002588- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2589 function.
2590
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002591- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2592 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002593
2594Mac
2595---
2596
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002597- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2598 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002599
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002600- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2601 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002602
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002603- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2604 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2605 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002606
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002607- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002608 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2609 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002610
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002611- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2612 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002613
2614
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002615What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2616=================================
2617
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002618*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002619
2620Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002621-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002622
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002623- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2624 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2625 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2626
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002627- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2628 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2629 (SF patch #664376.)
2630
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002631- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2632 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2633 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2634 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2635 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2636 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002637 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002638
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002639- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2640 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2641 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2642 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002643 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002644
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002645- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2646 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2647 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2648 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2649 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2650 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2651 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2652 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2653 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2654 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2655 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2656
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002657- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2658 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2659 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2660 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2661 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2662 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2663
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002664- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2665 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2666
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002667- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2668 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2669 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2670 case.)
2671
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002672- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2673 passed as unicode strings.
2674
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002675- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2676 See SF bug #683467.
2677
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002678- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2679 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2680
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002681- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2682
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002683- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2684
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002685- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2686 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2687 arguments.
2688
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002689- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2690 See SF bug #667147.
2691
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002692- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002693 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002694 See SF bug #676155.
2695
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002696- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002697 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002698 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2699 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2700 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2701 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2702 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2703 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002704
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002705Extension modules
2706-----------------
2707
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002708- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2709 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2710 tp_as_number pointer.
2711
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002712- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2713 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2714 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2715 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2716 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2717
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002718- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2719
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002720- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2721
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002722- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002723 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002724 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2725 patch #678531.)
2726
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002727- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2728 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2729
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002730- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2731 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2732
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002733- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2734
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002735- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2736 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2737 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2738
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002739- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2740
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002741- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2742 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2743
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002744- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002745
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002746- datetime changes:
2747
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002748 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2749
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002750 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2751 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2752 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2753 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2754 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2755 now.
2756
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002757 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002758 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2759 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002760
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002761 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002762 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002763 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2764 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2765 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2766 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002767
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002768 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2769 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2770 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002771 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2772
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002773 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2774 by a later example coded by Guido.
2775
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002776 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002777 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2778 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2779 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002780 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2781 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2782
2783 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2784 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2785 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2786 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2787 tzinfo subclass instance.
2788
2789 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2790 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2791 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2792 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2793 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2794 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2795 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2796 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002797
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002798 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2799 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2800 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2801 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2802 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002803 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2804
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002805 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002806
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002807 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2808 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2809 as a naive datetime object.
2810
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002811 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2812 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2813 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2814
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002815 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2816 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2817 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2818 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2819 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2820 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2821 comparison.
2822
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002823 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2824 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2825 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2826 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002827 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002828
2829 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002830
2831 and ::
2832
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002833 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2834
2835 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2836 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2837 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2838 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2839
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002840 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2841 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2842 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2843 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2844 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2845
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002846 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2847 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002848 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2849 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002850
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002851Library
2852-------
2853
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002854- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2855 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2856
2857- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2858 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2859 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2860 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2861 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2862 See PEP 307 for details.
2863
2864- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2865 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2866
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002867- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2868 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002869 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002870 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2871 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002872 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002873
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002874- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2875 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2876
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002877- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2878 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2879 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2880
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002881- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2882
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002883- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2884 exception.
2885
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002886- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2887 class.
2888
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002889- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2890 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2891 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2892
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002893- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2894 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2895
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002896- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002897 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2898 See SF bug #659228.
2899
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002900- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2901 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2902 See SF patch #651082.
2903
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002904- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002905
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002906- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2907 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2908
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002909- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002910 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002911
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002912- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2913 DOS paths from other platforms.
2914
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002915Tools/Demos
2916-----------
2917
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002918- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2919 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2920 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2921 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2922 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2923 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2924 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2925 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2926 example:
2927
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002928 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2929 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002930
2931 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2932
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002933
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002934Build
2935-----
2936
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002937- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2938 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2939 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002940 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2941
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002942 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2943
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002944- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2945 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2946 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2947 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2948 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2949 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2950 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2951 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2952 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2953
2954- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2955 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2956 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2957 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2958
2959- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2960 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2961
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002962C API
2963-----
2964
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002965- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2966 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002967
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002968- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2969 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2970 tp_as_number pointer.
2971
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002972- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2973 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2974 (SF #681367)
2975
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002976- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2977 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2978 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2979 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002980
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002981Tests
2982-----
2983
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002984- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002985 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2986 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2987 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2988 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2989 pydoc.)
2990
2991- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2992
2993- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002994
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002995Windows
2996-------
2997
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002998- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2999 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3000 time).
3001
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003002- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3003 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3004
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003005- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3006 release without strong cryptography.
3007
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003008- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003009 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003010
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003011- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3012 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3013
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003014Mac
3015---
3016
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003017- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3018 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003019
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003020- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3021 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3022 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003023
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003024- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3025 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003026
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003027- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3028 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3029 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3030 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003031
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003032- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003033 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3034 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3035 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003036
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003038What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003039=================================
3040
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003041*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003043Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003045
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003046- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3047
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003048- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3049 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003050 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003051 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003052 a different meaning than before.
3053
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003054- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003055 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003056 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003057
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003058- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003059 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003060 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003061
3062- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3063 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3064 and deallocation.
3065
3066- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3067 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3068
3069- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3070 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3071 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3072 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3073 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3074
3075- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3076 now detected by the garbage collector.
3077
3078- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3079 [SF bug 519621]
3080
3081- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3082 identifier.
3083
3084- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3085 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3086 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3087 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3088 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3089 [SF bug 563060]
3090
3091- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3092 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3093 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3094 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3095 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3096
3097- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3098 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3099 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3100
3101- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3102
3103- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3104 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3105 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3106 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3107 state of the slots would be lost.)
3108
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003109Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003111
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003112- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003113 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3114 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3115 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3116 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003117 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3118 Jython 2.1.
3119
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003120- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003121 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003122 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3123 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3124 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3125 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3126 these, see PEP 302.
3127
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003128- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3129 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3130 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3131
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003132- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3133 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3134 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3135
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003136- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3137 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3138 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3139
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003140- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3141 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3142 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3143 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3144 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3145 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3146 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3147 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3148 releases or implementations.
3149
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003150- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003151 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3152 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003153
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003154- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3155 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3156
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003157- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3158 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3159 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3160
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003161- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3162 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3163
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003164- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3165 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003166 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3167 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003168
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003169- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3170 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3171 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3172 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3173 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3174
3175 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3176 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3177 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3178 pattern.
3179
3180 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3181 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3182 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3183 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3184
3185 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3186 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3187 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3188 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3189 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3190 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3191
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003192- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3193 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3194 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3195 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3196 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3197 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3198 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3199 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003200
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003201- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3202 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3203 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3204 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3205 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003206 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3207 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3208 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3209 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3210 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3211 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3212 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003213
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003214- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3215 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3216
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003217- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3218 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3219 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3220 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3221 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3222 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3223 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3224 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3225 to Zack Weinberg!
3226
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003227- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3228 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3229 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3230 type. This has been fixed now.
3231
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003232- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3233 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3234 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3235
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003236- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3237 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3238 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3239 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3240 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3241 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3242 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3243 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003244 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003245
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003246- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3247 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3248 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003249
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003250- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3251 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3252 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3253 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3254 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3255 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3256 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3257 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003258 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003259 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3260 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3261
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003262- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3263 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3264 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3265 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3266 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3267 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3268 this.)
3269
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003270- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3271 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003272 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003273 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003274 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3275 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003276 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3277 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003278
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003279- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3280 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3281 currently running.
3282
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003283- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3284 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3285 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3286 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3287
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003288- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3289 as directory names.
3290
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003291- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3292 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3293
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003294- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3295 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3296
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003297- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003298 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3299 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003300
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003301- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3302 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3303 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3304 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3305 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3306
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003307- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3308 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3309 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3310 removed.
3311
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003312- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3313 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3314 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3315
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003316- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3317 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3318 to __debug__.
3319
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003320- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3321 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3322 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3323
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003324- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3325 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3326 deprecated now.
3327
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003328- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3329 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3330 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003331
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003332- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3333 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3334 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3335 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3336 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003337
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003338- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3339 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3340
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003341- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3342 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3343 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003344 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003345 is backward compatible.
3346
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003347- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3348 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3349 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3350 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3351 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3352
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003353- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3354 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3355 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3356 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3357 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3358 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003359
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003360- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3361 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3362
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003363- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3364 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3365
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003366- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3367 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3368 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3369 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3370 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3371
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003372- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3373 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3374 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3375
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003376- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003377 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3378
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003379- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3380 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3381 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003382
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003383- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3384 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3385
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003386- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3387 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3388 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3389
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003390- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3391
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003392Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003395- Added three operators to the operator module:
3396 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3397 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3398 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3399
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003400- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3401
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003402- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3403 archives.
3404
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003405- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3406 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3407 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3408
3409 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3410
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003411- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3412 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3413 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003414 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003415
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003416- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3417 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3418 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3419 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003420 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3421 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3422 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3423 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003424
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003425- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3426 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003427
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003428- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3429
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003430- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3431 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3432
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003433- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3434 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3435 supported.
3436
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003437- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3438
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003439- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3440 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003441
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003442- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3443 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3444
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003445- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3446
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003447- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3448 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3449
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003450- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3451 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3452 functions but callable type objects.
3453
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003454- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003455 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003456 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003457
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003458- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3459 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003460
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003461- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3462 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003463
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003464- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3465 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3466 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3467 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3468
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003469- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3470 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003471
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003472- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3473 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3474 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3475 and __imul__.
3476
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003477- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003478 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3479 is called.
3480
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003481- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3482 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3483 interpreter was compiled.
3484
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003485- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3486 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3487 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003488 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003489 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3490 1, not 2.
3491
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003492- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3493 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3494 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3495 limit.
3496
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003497- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3498 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3499 bug #623464.
3500
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003501- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3502 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3503 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3504 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003506Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003508
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003509- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3510
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003511- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3512 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3513 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3514 with Python 2.3a2.
3515
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003516- os.path exposes getctime.
3517
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003518- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003519 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003520 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003521 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003522 unit tests of floating point results.
3523
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003524- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3525 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3526 has been increased.
3527
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003528- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3529 executed.
3530
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003531- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3532 postinstallation script.
3533
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003534- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3535 test the current module.
3536
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003537- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003538 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3539 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3540 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3541 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3542
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003543- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003544 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003545 Ward's Optik package.
3546
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003547- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3548 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3549 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3550 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3551
3552- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3553 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003554 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003555
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003556- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3557 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3558 shelf are binary pickles.
3559
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003560- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3561 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3562
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003563- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3564 modules are iterators now.
3565
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003566- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3567 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3568 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3569 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3570 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3571 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003572
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003573- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3574 with their entity value.
3575
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003576- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3577
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003578- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3579 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003580
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003581- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3582 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003583 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003584
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003585- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3586 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3587 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3588 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3589 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3590 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3591 main():
3592
3593 import locale
3594 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3595
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003596- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3597 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3598
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003599- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3600 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3601 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3602 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3603 to the new standard.
3604
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003605- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3606 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3607 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3608 an extension to the database.
3609
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003610- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3611 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3612 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3613 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003614 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003615
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003616- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003617 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003618
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003619- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3620 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3621 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3622 bounded integers.
3623
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003624- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3625 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3626 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3627 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3628 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3629 in existence.
3630
3631 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3632 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3633 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3634 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3635 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3636 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3637
3638 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3639 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3640 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3641 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3642
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003643- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3644 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3645 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3646
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003647- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3648
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003649- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3650 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3651 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3652 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3653
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003654- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3655 argument.
3656
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003657- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3658 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3659 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3660 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3661 [SF patch 560794].
3662
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003663- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3664 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3665 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003666 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3667 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3668 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003669
3670- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3671 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003672
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003673- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3674 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3675 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3676 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003677
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003678- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3679 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3680 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3681 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3682 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3683
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003684- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003685
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003686- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3687
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003688- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3689 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3690 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3691 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3692 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3693 identical to None.
3694
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003695- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3696 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3697 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3698 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3699 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3700 results now.
3701
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003702- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3703 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3704
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003705- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3706 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3707 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3708 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3709 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3710 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3711 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3712 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3713
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003714- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3715
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003716- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3717 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3718
3719- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3720 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3721 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3722 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3723 and other systems.
3724
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003725- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3726 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3727 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3728 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 +00003729 work well with these.
3730
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003731- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3732
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003733- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003734 connections.
3735
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003736- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3737 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3738 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3739
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003740- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3741 sets
3742
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003743- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3744 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3745 name.
3746
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003747- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3748 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3749 passed in.
3750
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003751- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003752 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003753 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3754 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003755
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003756- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3757
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003758- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3759
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003760- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3761 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3762 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3763
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003764- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3765 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3766 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3767 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003768 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003769
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003770- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003771 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003772 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003773
3774- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3775 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3776 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3777
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003778- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003779 the value of its expression argument.
3780
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003781- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3782 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3783 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3784
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003785- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3786 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3787 skipstone browser was included.
3788
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003789- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3790 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3791
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003792Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003794
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003795- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3796 names in addition to accepting file names.
3797
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003798- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3799 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3800 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3801 still used and useful.)
3802
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003803- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3804 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3805 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3806 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003807
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003808- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3809 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3810 the generated binary.
3811
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003812Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003814
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003815- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3816
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003817- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3818 except in the hands of experts.
3819
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003820- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003821 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3822 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3823 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003824
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003825- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3826 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3827 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3828 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3829 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3830 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3831 builds.
3832
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003833- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3834 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3835 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3836 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3837 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3838 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3839 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3840 new type.
3841
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003842- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003843
3844 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3845 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3846 positive infinities.
3847
3848 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3849 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3850 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3851 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3852 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3853 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3854 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3855
3856 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3857
3858 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3859
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003860- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3861 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3862 size of the executable.
3863
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003864- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3865 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3866 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3867 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003868
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003869- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3870
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003871- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3872 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3873 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003874
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003875- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3876 well as Unix.
3877
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003878- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3879 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3880 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3881 modules in the README file for details.
3882
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003883C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003885
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003886- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3887 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003888 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003889 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003890 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003891
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003892- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3893 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3894 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3895 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3896 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3897 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003898 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003899 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3900 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3901 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3902 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3903 aligned.)
3904
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003905- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3906 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3907 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3908
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003909- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3910 level.
3911
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003912- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3913 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3914 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3915 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3916 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3917
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003918- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3919 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3920 code.
3921
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003922- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3923 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3924 adjusting for negative indices.
3925
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003926- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3927 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3928 object.
3929
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003930- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3931 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3932 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3933
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003934- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3935 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003936
3937- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3938
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003939- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3940 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3941 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3942 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3943
3944- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3945
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003946- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003947
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003948- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003949 without going through the buffer API.
3950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003952
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003953- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3954 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3955 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3956 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3957
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003958- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3959 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3960
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003961- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003962 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3963
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003966
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003967- OpenVMS is now supported.
3968
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003969- AtheOS is now supported.
3970
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003971- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3972
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003973- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3974
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-----
3977
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003978- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3979 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3980 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003981
3982Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003984
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003985- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3986 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3987 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3988 bugs.
3989 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003990 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003991 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3992 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003993 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003994
3995- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003996 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003997
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003998- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3999 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4000
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004001- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4002 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004003 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004004 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4005
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004006- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4007 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4008 use files" uninstall option).
4009
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004010- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4011
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004012- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4013 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4014
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004015- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4016 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4017 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4018
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004019- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4020 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4021 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4022 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4023 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004024 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4025 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4026 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004027
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004028- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004029 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004030 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4031 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4032 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4033 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4034 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4035 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4036 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4037 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4038 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4039 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4040 work around.
4041
4042- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4043 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4044 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4045 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4046 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4047 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4048 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4049 specified with O_CREAT too).
4050
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004051Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052----
4053
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004054- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004055
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004056- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4057 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4058 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4059
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004060- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4061 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4062 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4063
4064- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4065 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4066 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4067 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4068 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4069 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4070 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4071 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004072
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004073- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4074 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4075 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004076
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004077- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4078 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4079 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4080 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4081 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004082
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004083- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4084 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4085 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004086
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004087- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4088 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004089
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004090- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4091 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4092 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4093 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4094 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004096- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4097 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4098 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4099
4100- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4101 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4102 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004103
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004104- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4105 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4106 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4107 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004108 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004109
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004110- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4111 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004112
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004113- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4114 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004115
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004116- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004117 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004118 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4119 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004120
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004121
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004122What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004123===============================
4124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4126
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004127Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004129
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004130- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4131 with a custom metaclass.
4132
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004133Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004135
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004136- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4137 are proxies.
4138
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004139Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004141
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004142- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4143 very short strings.
4144
4145- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4146 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4147 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4148 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4149 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4150
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004151Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004153
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004154- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4155 close or delete time).
4156
4157- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4158 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4159
4160- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4161
4162- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004163 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004164
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004165Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004167
4168Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004170
4171C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004173
4174New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004176
4177Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004179
4180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004182
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004183- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4184
4185- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4186 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4187
4188- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4189 deleted at process exit time.
4190
4191- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4192 in backslash.
4193
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004194Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004196
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004197- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4198 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4199 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4200
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004201
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004202What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004203===========================
4204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4206
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004207Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004209
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004210- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4211 been extensively updated. See
4212
4213 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4214
4215 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4216
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004217- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4218 deleted!
4219
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004220- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4221 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4222 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4223 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4224 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4225
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004226- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4227
4228 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4229 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4230
4231 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4232 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4233 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4234 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4235 supported anyway.
4236
4237 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4238 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4239
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004240- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4241 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4242 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4243 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4244 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004245
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004246- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4247 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4248 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4249
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004250Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004252
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004253- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4254 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4255 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4256 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4257 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4258 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004259 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4260 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4261 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4262 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004263
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004264- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4265 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4266 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4267
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004268Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004270
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004271- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4272
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004273Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004275
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004276- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4277 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4278 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4279 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4280 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4281 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4282
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004283- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4284
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004285- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4286
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004287- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4288
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004289- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4290 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4291 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4292
4293- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4294
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004295Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004297
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004298- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4299 off a search on Google.
4300
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004301Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004303
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004304- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4305 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4306 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4307 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4308 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4309 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4310 other platforms should do likewise.
4311
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004312- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4313 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4314 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4315
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004316C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004318
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004319- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4320 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4321 producing key-value pairs.
4322
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004323- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004324 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004325 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4326 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4327 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4328 previously went unchallenged.
4329
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004330New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004332
4333Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004335
4336Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004338
4339Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004341
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004342- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4343 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004344
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004345- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4346 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4347 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4348 home.
4349
4350
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004351What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004352===========================
4353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4355
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004356Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004358
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004359- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4360 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004361
4362 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004363 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004364
4365 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4366 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004367 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004368 This needs to be documented.
4369
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004370- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4371 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4372
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004373- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4374 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4375 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4376
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004377- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4378 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4379
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004380- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4381 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4382 class forbids it).
4383
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004384- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4385 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4386 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4387
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004388- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4389
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004390Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004392
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004393- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4394 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004395 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004396
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004397- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4398 (like 1 + '').
4399
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004400Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004402
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004403- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4404 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4405 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4406 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004407 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004408 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4409
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004410- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4411 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4412 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4413 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4414
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004415- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4416 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004417 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4418 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4419 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004420
4421- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4422 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004423
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004424- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4425 bytes on its input.
4426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004427Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004430- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004431 convenience function.
4432
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004433- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4434 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4435 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004436 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4437 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4438 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4439 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4440 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4441 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004442
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004443- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4444 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4445 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4446 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4447
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004448- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4449 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4450 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4451
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004452- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4453 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4454 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4455 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4456
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004457- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4458 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004460 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4461 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4462 new -l and -e options.
4463
4464- statcache is now deprecated.
4465
4466- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4467 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004469 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4470 time properly taken into account.
4471
4472- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4473 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4474 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4475 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4476
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004477Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004479
4480Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004482
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004483- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4484 is built with libdb3 if available.
4485
4486- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4487
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004488C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004490
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004491- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4492 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4493 PySequence_Size().
4494
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004495- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4496
4497- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4498 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4499 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4500
4501- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4502 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4503
4504- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4505 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4506
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004507New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004509
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004510- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4511 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4512
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004513- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4514 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4515
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004516- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4517
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004518Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004520
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004521- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4522 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004524Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004526
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004527Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004529
4530- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4531 removed completely in the next release.
4532
4533- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4534 OSX.
4535
4536- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4537 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4538
4539- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4540
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004541
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004542What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004543===========================
4544
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4546
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004547Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004549
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004550- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004551 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004552 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004553 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4554 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004555 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4556 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004557 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4558 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004559
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004560- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4561 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4562
4563- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4564 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4565
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004566Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004568
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004569- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4570 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4571 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4572 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4573 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4574 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4575 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4576 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4577
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004578- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4579 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4580 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4581 example).
4582
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004583- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004584 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004585 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004586 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004587
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004588- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4589 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4590 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004591 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004592
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004593- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4594 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4595 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4596 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4597 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4598 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4599
4600 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4601
4602 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4603
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004604Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004606
4607- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4608
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004609- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4610
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004611- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4612 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004613
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004614- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4615 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4616 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4617 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4618 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4619 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004620 attributes.
4621
4622- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4623 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4624 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004625
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004626- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4627 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4628 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004629
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004630- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4631 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4632 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004633 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4634 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4635
4636- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4637 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004638
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004639Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004641
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004642- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4643 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4644
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004645- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4646 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4647 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4648 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4649
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004650- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4651 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4652 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4653 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4654
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004655 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4656 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4657 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4658 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4659 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4660 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4661 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4662 without losing information).
4663
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004664- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004665 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4666 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4667 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4668 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4669 module).
4670
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004671 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004672 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4673 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4674 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4675 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004676
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004677- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004678 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4679 encoding.
4680
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004681- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4682 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4683
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004685 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4686
4687- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4688 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4689 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4690 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4691
4692- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4693
4694- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4695 ON, and OFF.
4696
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004697- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4698 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4699
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004700Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004702
4703- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4704 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4705 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004706
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004707- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4708 been added: -X and -E.
4709
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004710Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004712
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004713- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4714 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4715
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004716C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004718
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004719- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4720 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4721 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4722 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4723 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4724
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004725- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4726 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4727 as long) arguments.
4728
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004729- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4730 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4731 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4732 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4733 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4734 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4735
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004736- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4737 input.
4738
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004739New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004741
4742Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004744
4745Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004747
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004748- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4749 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4750 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4751
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004752- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4753 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4754 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004755 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4758 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4759 import signal
4760 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004761
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004763 while 1:
4764 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004766 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4767 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4768 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4769 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004770
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004771
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004772What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4773===========================
4774
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4776
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004777Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004779
4780- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4781 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4782 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4783
4784- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4785 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4786 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4787 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4788 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4789 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4790 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004791
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004792- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004793 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004794 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4795 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4796 associate a docstring with a property.
4797
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004798- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4799 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4800 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4801 other built-in object types.
4802
4803- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4804 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4805 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4806 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4807 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4808
4809- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4810 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4811
4812- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4813 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004814 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004815 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4816 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4817 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4818 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4819 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4820
4821- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4822 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4823 class.
4824
4825- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4826 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4827 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4828 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4829
4830- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4831 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4832 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4833 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4834
4835- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4836 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4837
4838- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4839 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4840 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4841 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4842 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004843 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004844 with the same value as s.
4845
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004846- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4847
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004848Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004850
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004851- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4852
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004853- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4854 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4855 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4856 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4857 objects.
4858
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004859- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4860 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004861 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4862 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4863
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004864- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4865 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4866 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4867
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004870
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004871- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4872 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4873 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4874 by the instances.
4875
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004876- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4877 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4878 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4879
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004880- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4881 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4882 before the entire comparison is complete.
4883
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004884- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4885 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4886 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4887
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004888- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4889 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4890 getwriter().
4891
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004892- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4893 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4894
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004895- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004896 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4897 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4898
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004899- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4900 iterable object.
4901
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004902- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4903 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004904
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004905- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4906 authentication.
4907
4908- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4909 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004910
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004911- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004912 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4913 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4914 a sample driver.)
4915
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004916Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004918
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004919- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4920 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4921 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4922 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4923 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4924 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4925 kernel has large file support.
4926
4927- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4928 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4929 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4930 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4931 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4932
4933- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4934 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4935 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4936
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004937C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004939
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004940- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4941 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4942
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004943New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004945
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004946- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4947 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4948
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004949Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004951
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004952- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4953 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4954 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4955 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4956 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4957
4958- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4959 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4960 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4961 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4962
4963- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4964 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4965
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004966Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004968
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004969- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004970 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4971 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004972
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004973
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004974What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4975===========================
4976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4978
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004979Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004981
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004982- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4983 big to represent as a C double.
4984
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004985- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4986 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4987 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4988 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4989 restriction).
4990
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004991- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4992 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4993 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4994 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4995 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4996
4997 >>> dir([])
4998 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4999 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5000 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5001 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5002 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5003 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5004 'reverse', 'sort']
5005
5006 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5007
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005008- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005009 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5010 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5011 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5012 OverflowError exception.
5013
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005014- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005015 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005016 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5017 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5018 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5019 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5020 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005021 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5023 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5024
5025 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5026 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5027 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5028 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005029
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005030- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005031 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5032 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5033 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5034 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5035 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5036 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5037 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5038 once it is created.
5039
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005040- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5041 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5042 (key, value) pairs.
5043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005044- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005045 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5046 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5047
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005048- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5049 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5050 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5051 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5052 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005053
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005054- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005055 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5056 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5057
5058 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5059
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005060- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005061 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5062
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005063Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005065
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005066- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005067 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5068 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005069
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005070- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5071 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5072 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5073 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5074 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5075 in this area anymore).
5076
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005077- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5078 threading.Timer.
5079
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005080- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5081 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5082
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005083- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005084 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5085
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005086- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005087 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5088 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5089 converted to Python longs.
5090
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005091- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005092 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5093
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005094- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5095 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5096 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5097
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005098Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005100
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005101- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5102 division operators as per PEP 238.
5103
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005104Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005106
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005107- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5108 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5109 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5110 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5111
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005112C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005114
5115- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005116
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005117- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5118 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005119 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5122 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005123 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005125
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005126- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005127 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5128 module:
5129
5130 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005131
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005132 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5133 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005134
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005135 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5136 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005137
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005138 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5139
5140 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5141
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005142- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005143 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5144 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5145 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005146
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005147New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005149
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005150- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5151 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5152 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5153 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5154 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005155
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005156Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005158
5159Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005161
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005162- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5163 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5164 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5165 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005166 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5167 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5168 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5169 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5170 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005171
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005172- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005173 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5174
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005175
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005176What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5177===========================
5178
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5180
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005181Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005183
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005184- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5185 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5186
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005187- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5188 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5189 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005190
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005191- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5192 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5193 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5194 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005195
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005196- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5197
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005199
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005200Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005202
5203- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005204 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005205 the module docstring for details.
5206
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005207Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005209
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005210- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005211 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5212 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5213 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005214
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005215- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5216 Nick Mathewson.
5217
5218Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005220
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005221- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5222 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5223 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5224 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5225 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5226 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5227 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5228 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5229
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005230- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5231 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5232 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5233 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5234
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005235- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5236 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5237 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5238 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5239 come a long way).
5240
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005241- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5242 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5243 write filters for these warnings).
5244
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005245- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5246 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5247 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5248 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5249 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5250
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005251- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5252 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5253 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5254 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5255 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5256 older distribution.
5257
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005258Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005260
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005261- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5262 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005263 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005264
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005265- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5266 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5267 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5268
5269- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5270
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005271- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5272
5273- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5274
5275- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5276
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005278
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005279- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5280
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005281New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005283
5284C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005286
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005287- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5288 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5289 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5290 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5291 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5292 against buffer overruns.
5293
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005294- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005295 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5296 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005297 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5298 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5299 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5300
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005301- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5302 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5303 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5304 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5305 deprecated.
5306
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005307Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005308-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005309
5310- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5311 relevant is found.
5312
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005313
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005314What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005315===========================
5316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005317*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5318
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005319Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005320----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005321
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005322- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5323 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5324 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5325 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5326 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5327 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5328 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5329 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005330 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005331 repaired.
5332
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005333- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005334 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005335 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5336 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5337 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5338 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5339 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5340 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5341 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5342 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5343
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005344- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5345 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5346 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5347 leading BMO character).
5348
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005349- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5350 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5351 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5352
5353 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5354 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5355 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005356
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005357 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5358 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5359 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5360 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5361 for various simple to use conversions.
5362
5363 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5364 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5365
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5367 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5368 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5369 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5370 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5371 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5372 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5373 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5374 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5375 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5376 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5377 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5378 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5379 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5380 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005381
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005382- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5383 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5384 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005385 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005386 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005387
5388 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005389 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5390 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5391 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5392 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5393 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005394 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5395 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005396
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005397 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5398 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5399 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005400 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005401
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005402- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5403 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5404 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5405 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5406 floating arithmetic,
5407
5408 x = 9007199254740992.0
5409 print long(x)
5410
5411 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5412 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5413 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5414 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5415 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5416 functions are of good quality).
5417
5418 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5419 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5420 algorithms to break.
5421
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005422- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5423 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5424 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5425 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5426 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5427 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5428 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5429 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5430 order.
5431
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005432- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5433 operation along the most common code paths.
5434
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005435- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5436 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5437
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005438- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5439 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5440 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5441 {}.update(UserDict())
5442
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005443- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5444 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5445 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5446 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5447 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5448 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5449 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5450 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5451
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005452- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005453 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005455 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005456 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5457 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005458 join() method of strings
5459 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005460 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5461 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005462 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005463 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005464
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005465- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5466 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5467
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005468- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5469 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5470
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005471- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5472 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5473 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5474 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5475
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005476- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5477 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005478 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005479 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5480 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005481
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005482- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5483
5484
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005485Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005487
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005488- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005489 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005490 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5491 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5492
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005493- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5494 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5495
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005496- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5497 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5498 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5499 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5500
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005501- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5502 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5503 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5504
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005505- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5506
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005507- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5508
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005509- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5510 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5511 that are still imported into string.py).
5512
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005513- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5514
5515- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5516 Now it does.
5517
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005518- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5519
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005520- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5521 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5522 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5523 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5524 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005525 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5526 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005527
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005528- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5529 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5530 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5531 'help(object)'.
5532
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005533Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005534-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005535
5536- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005537 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005538 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5539 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5540
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005541- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005542 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5543 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005544
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005545C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005546-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005547
5548- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5549 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550
5551----
5552
5553**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**