blob: 5bf2e513fa67cf5e0b72d675268b335c88ad3a93 [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
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000013- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
14 returning None.
15
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000016- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
17 ('\') with a specific error message.
18
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000019- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
20
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000021- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
22 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
23
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000024- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000025 an ferror() call.
26
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000027- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
28 list.sort().
29
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000030- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
31 (2+3) --> (5).
32
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000033- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
34
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000035- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
36 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000037
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000038- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
39 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
40 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
41
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000042Extension Modules
43-----------------
44
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000045- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
46 file size.
47
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000048- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
49
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000050- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
51 {remove_history,replace_history}
52
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000053- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
54 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000055
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000056- stat_float_times is now True.
57
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000058- array.array objects are now picklable.
59
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000060- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
61 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
62
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000063- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
64 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
65 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
66
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000067- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
68 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000069
70Library
71-------
72
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000073- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
74 profile.py if available.
75
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000076- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
77
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000078- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
79 in LWPCookieJar.
80
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000081- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
82
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000083- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
84
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000085- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
86
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000087- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
88
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000089- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
90
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000091- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
92
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000093- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
94
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000095- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
96
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000097- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
98 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
99 be exploited in various ways.
100
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000101- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
102
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000103- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
104
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000105- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
106
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000107- Enhancements to the csv module:
108
109 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
110 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
111 PEP 305.
112 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
113 reporting.
114 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
115 dictates.
116 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000117 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000118 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000119 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
120 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000121 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
122 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000123 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000124 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
125 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
126 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
127 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
128 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
129 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
130 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
131 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
132 without first creating a dialect class.
133 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
134 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
135 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000136 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000137 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
138 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000139 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
140 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
141 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
142 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000143 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
144 This has been fixed.
145
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000146- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
147 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
148 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
149 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
150
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000151- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
152
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000153- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
154 (Bug #951915).
155
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000156- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
157 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
158 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
159 encoding alias table
160
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000161- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
162
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000163- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
164 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
165
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000166- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
167
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000168- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
169
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000170- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
171
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000172- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
173
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000174- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
175
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000176- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
177 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
178 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
179
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000180- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000181 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000182
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000183- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
184 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
185 tokenizer with very long source lines.
186
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000187- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
188 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
189
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000190- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
191 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000192
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000193- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
194 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
195
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000196Build
197-----
198
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000199- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
200 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
201
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000202- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
203 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
204 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
205 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
206 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
207 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
208 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
209 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
210
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000211- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
212 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
213 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
214 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216
217C API
218-----
219
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000220- Removed PyRange_New().
221
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000222
223Tests
224-----
225
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000226- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000227
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000228
229Documentation
230-------------
231
232- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
233 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
234 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
235
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000236Mac
237---
238
239
240
241Tools/Demos
242-----------
243
244
245
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000246What's New in Python 2.4 final?
247===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000248
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000249*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000250
251Core and builtins
252-----------------
253
254- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
255 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
256 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
257
258
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000259What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
260==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000261
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000262*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000263
264Core and builtins
265-----------------
266
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000267- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
268 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
269 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
270
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000271
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000272Library
273-------
274
275- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
276 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
277 raised is re-raised.
278
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000279- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
280 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
281
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000282- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
283 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
284 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
285 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
286 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
287 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
288 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
289 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
290 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
291 by the slice are recomputed now.
292
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000293- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000294
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000295Build
296-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000297
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000298- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
299 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
300 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000301
302C API
303-----
304
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000305- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
306
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000307
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000308What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
309================================
310
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000311*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000312
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000313License
314-------
315
316The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
317is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
318changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
319Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
320intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
321durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
322the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
323License::
324
325 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
326
327says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
328to Python 2.1.1.
329
330The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
331License Version 2.
332
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000333Core and builtins
334-----------------
335
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000336- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
337 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
338 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
339 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
340 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
341 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
342 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
343 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
344 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
345 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
346
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000347- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000348
349Extension Modules
350-----------------
351
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000352- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
353 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
354 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
355 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000356
357Library
358-------
359
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000360- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
361 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
362 returned.
363
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000364- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
365
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000366- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
367 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
368
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000369- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
370
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000371- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
372 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000373
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000374- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
375
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000376- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
377
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000378- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000379 the source code is updated and reloaded.
380
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000381Build
382-----
383
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000384- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000385
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000386What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
387================================
388
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000389*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000390
391Core and builtins
392-----------------
393
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000394- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000395 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
396
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000397- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
398 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
399 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
400 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
401
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000402- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
403 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
404
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000405- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
406 constant.
407
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000408- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
409 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
410 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
411 large), and to anomalies such as
412 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
413 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
414 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
415 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000416
417Extension modules
418-----------------
419
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000420- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
421 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000422 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
423 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
424 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000425
426Library
427-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000428
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000429- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000430 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000431 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
432 --swig-cpp.
433
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000434- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
435 it is set.
436
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000437- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000438
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000439- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
440 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
441 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
442 Closes bug #1039270.
443
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000444- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000445
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000446 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000447 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
448 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
449 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
450 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
451 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
452 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
453 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
454 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
455 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
456 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
457 + Updates to documentation.
458
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000459- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
460 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
461 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
462 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
463
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000464- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000465
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000466- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
467 applications should use the getmember function.
468
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000469- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
470
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000471- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
472 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
473 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
474 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
475 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
476 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
477 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
478 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
479 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
480
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000481- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
482 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000483 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000484
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000485- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
486 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
487 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
488 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
489 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
490 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
491 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
492 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000493
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000494- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
495 the new public features (of which there are many).
496
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000497- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000498 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
499 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
500 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
501 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000502 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000503
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000504- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
505
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000506- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
507 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
508 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
509 options.
510
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000511- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
512 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
513 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
514 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
515 conditions under which non-string values work.
516
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000517Build
518-----
519
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000520- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
521 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
522 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
523
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000524- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
525 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
526 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
527 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
528 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000529
530C API
531-----
532
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000533- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
534 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
535
536- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
537
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000538- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
539 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
540 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
541 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
542 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
543 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
544 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
545 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
546 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
547
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000548- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
549
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000550- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
551 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
552 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000553
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000554Tests
555-----
556
557- test__locale ported to unittest
558
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000559Mac
560---
561
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000562- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
563 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
564 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000565
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000566Tools/Demos
567-----------
568
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000569- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
570 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
571 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
572 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
573 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000574
575
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000576What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
577=================================
578
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000579*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000580
581Core and builtins
582-----------------
583
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000584- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000585 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
586
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000587- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
588 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
589 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
590 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
591 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
592 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
593 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
594 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000595 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
596 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
597 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
598 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
599 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000600
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000601- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
602 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
603 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
604 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
605 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
606
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000607- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
608
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000609- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
610 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
611
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000612- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
613 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
614 modified the list.
615
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000616- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
617 functions is now writable.
618
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000619- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
620 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
621 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
622 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
623
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000624- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
625 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
626 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
627 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
628 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000629
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000630- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
631 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
632
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000633Extension modules
634-----------------
635
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000636- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
637
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000638- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
639 data.
640
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000641- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
642 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
643 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
644 supposed to have been truncated away.
645
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000646- Added socket.socketpair().
647
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000648- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
649 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
650
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000651- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000652 versions of Python, have now been removed.
653
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000654Library
655-------
656
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000657- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000658 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000659
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000660- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
661 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
662
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000663- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
664 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
665
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000666- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
667
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000668- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
669 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000670
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000671- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
672 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
673
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000674- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
675
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000676- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
677
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000678- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
679
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000680- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
681 Percivall.
682
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000683- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
684 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
685
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000686- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
687 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
688 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000689 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000690
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000691- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
692 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
693 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
694 and exponent.
695
696- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
697
698- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
699 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
700 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
701
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000702- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
703 to the readline module.
704
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000705- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000706 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
707 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000708
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000709- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
710 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
711 contains symlinks.
712
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000713- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
714 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
715
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000716- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
717 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
718 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
719
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000720- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
721 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
722 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
723 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
724 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
725 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
726 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
727 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
728 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
729 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
730 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
731 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
732 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
733
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000734- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
735
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000736Tools/Demos
737-----------
738
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000739- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
740 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
741
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000742- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
743
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000744Build
745-----
746
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000747- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
748 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
749 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
750 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
751 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
752 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
753 plans to do so.
754
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000755- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
756 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
757
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000758- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
759 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
760
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000761- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
762 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
763
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000764- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
765 GNU/k*BSD systems.
766
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000767- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
768 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
769
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000770C API
771-----
772
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000773..
774
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000775Documentation
776-------------
777
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000778- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
779 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
780
781- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
782 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
783 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000784
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000785New platforms
786-------------
787
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000788- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
789
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000790Tests
791-----
792
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000793..
794
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000795Windows
796-------
797
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000798- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
799 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
800 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
801 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
802 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
803 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
804 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
805 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
806 the problem.
807
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000808Mac
809---
810
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000811..
812
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000813
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000814What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
815=================================
816
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000817*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000818
819Core and builtins
820-----------------
821
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000822- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
823 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
824 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
825 sensitive code.
826
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000827- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000828 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000829
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000830 @staticmethod
831 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000832
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000833 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000834
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000835- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
836 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
837 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
838 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
839 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
840 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
841 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
842 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
843 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
844 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
845 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
846
847 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
848 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
849 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
850 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
851 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
852 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
853 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
854
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000855- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
856 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
857
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000858- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000859 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000860
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000861- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000862 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000863 which was missing for no apparent reason.
864
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000865- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000866 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
867 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
868
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000869- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
870 types that support garbage collection.
871
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000872- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
873
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000874- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
875 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
876 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
877 Jython.
878
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000879- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
880
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000881- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
882 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
883
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000884- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
885 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
886 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000887
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000888- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
889 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
890 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
891
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000892Extension modules
893-----------------
894
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000895- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
896
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000897Library
898-------
899
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000900- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
901 TIS-620
902
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000903- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
904 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
905 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
906 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
907 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
908 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
909 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
910 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
911 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
912 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
913
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000914- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
915
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000916- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
917 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
918 same as when the argument is omitted).
919 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
920
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000921- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
922
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000923- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
924 schemes are offered.
925
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000926- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
927
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000928- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
929 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
930 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
931
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000932- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
933
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000934- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
935 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
936
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000937- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
938 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
939 when dummy_threading is being used.
940
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000941- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
942 from a tarfile.
943
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000944- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000945 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000946
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000947- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
948 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
949 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
950 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
951
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000952- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
953 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
954
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000955- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
956 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
957 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
958 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
959 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
960 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
961 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
962 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
963 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
964 by some other method in progress).
965
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000966- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
967 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
968 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000969
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000970- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
971
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000972- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
973 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
974 AM Kuchling.
975
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000976- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
977 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
978 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
979
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000980- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
981 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
982 instead of unsigned.
983
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000984- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000985 no longer part of the public API.
986
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000987- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
988 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
989 string methods of the same name).
990
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000991- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000992 SF patch 945642.
993
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000994- doctest unittest integration improvements:
995
996 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
997
998 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
999 DocTestSuites.
1000
1001- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1002 that provide thread-local data.
1003
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001004- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1005 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1006
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001007- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1008
1009- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1010 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1011 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1012
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001013- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1014
1015 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1016 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1017 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001018
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001019 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1020 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1021 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1022 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1023
1024 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1025 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1026
1027 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1028 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1029 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1030 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1031
1032 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1033 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1034 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1035 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1036 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1037
1038 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1039 wrapping help output.
1040
1041 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1042 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1043 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001044
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001045C API
1046-----
1047
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001048- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1049 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1050 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1051 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1052 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1053 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1054 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1055 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1056 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1057 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1058 its visible semantics have not changed.
1059
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001060- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1061 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1062
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001063Documentation
1064-------------
1065
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001066- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001067
1068 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001069 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001070
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001071 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001072
1073 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1074
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001075- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001076
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001077Tests
1078-----
1079
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001080- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001081 platforms that use the Makefile.
1082
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001083- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1084 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1085 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1086
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001087
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001088What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1089=================================
1090
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001091*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001092
1093Core and builtins
1094-----------------
1095
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001096- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1097 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1098 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1099 objects now (one object instead of three).
1100
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001101- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1102 Windows DLLs.
1103
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001104- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1105 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001106
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001107- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1108 a new .pyc magic.
1109
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001110- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1111 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1112 be there.
1113
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001114- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1115 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1116 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1117
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001118- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1119 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1120 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1121
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001122- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1123
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001124- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1125 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1126 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001127
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001128- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1129 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1130
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001131- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1132
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001133- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001134 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001135
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001136- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1137
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001138- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1139
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001140- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1141 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1142
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001143- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1144 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1145 Fixes bug #858016 .
1146
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001147- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1148 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1149 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1150
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001151- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1152 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1153 improves their performance (about 35%).
1154
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001155- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1156 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1157 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1158
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001159- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1160 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1161 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1162 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1163
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001164- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1165 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1166 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1167 length is not known).
1168
1169- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1170 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001171 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1172 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001173 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1174
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001175- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1176 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1177
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001178- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1179 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1180 keyword arguments.
1181
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001182- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1183 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1184 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1185
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001186- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1187 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1188 cases.
1189
1190- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1191 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1192 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1193 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1194 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1195 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1196 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1197 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1198 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1199 a release build.
1200
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001201- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1202 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1203
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001204- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001205 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001206
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001207- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1208 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1209 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1210 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1211 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1212 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1213 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1214 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1215 destroyed.
1216
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001217- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1218 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1219 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1220 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1221 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1222 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1223 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1224 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1225
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001226- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1227 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1228 character other than a space.
1229
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001230- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1231 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1232 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1233 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1234 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1235 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1236 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1237 attributes with the same name.
1238
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001239- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1240 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1241 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1242 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1243 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1244 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1245 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1246 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1247 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1248 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1249 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1250 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1251 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1252 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001253
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001254- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1255 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1256 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1257 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1258 This has been repaired.
1259
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001260- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1261
1262- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1263
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001264- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1265 over a sequence.
1266
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001267- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001268 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001269
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001270- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1271
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001272- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1273 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1274 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1275 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1276 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1277 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1278 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1279 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1280
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001281- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1282 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1283 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1284
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001285- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1286 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1287 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1288 freelist.
1289
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001290- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1291 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1292
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001293- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1294 number.
1295
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001296- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1297 a TypeError exception.
1298
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001299- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1300 820195.
1301
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001302- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1303 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1304 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1305
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001306- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001307 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1308 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001309
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001310- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1311 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1312 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1313
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001314- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1315 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001316 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001317
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001318- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001319 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1320 the first call.
1321
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001322
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001323Extension modules
1324-----------------
1325
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001326- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1327 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1328
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001329- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1330 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1331 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1332 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1333 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1334 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1335 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001336
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001337- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1338
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001339- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1340
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001341- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1342 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1343
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001344- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1345 fewer false positives.
1346
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001347- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1348 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1349
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001350- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001351 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1352
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001353- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001354 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001355 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001356 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1357 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001358
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001359- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1360 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1361 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1362 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1363
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001364- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1365 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1366 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1367 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1368 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1369 #897625.
1370
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001371- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1372 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1373
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001374- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1375 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1376 and pops on either side of the deque.
1377
1378- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1379 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1380
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001381- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1382 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1383 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1384 other functions that expect a function argument.
1385
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001386- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1387
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001388- os.getsid was added.
1389
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001390- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1391 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1392 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1393
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001394- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1395
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001396- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1397
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001398- readline.clear_history was added.
1399
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001400- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1401
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001402- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1403
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001404- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1405
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001406- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1407
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001408- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1409
1410- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1411
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001412- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1413
1414- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1415
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001416- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1417 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1418 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1419
1420- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1421 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1422 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1423 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1424 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1425 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1426 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1427
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001428- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1429 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1430 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1431 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001432
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001433- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001434 iterators from a single iterable.
1435
1436- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1437 of raising a TypeError exception.
1438
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001439- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1440 as parameter.
1441
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001442Library
1443-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001444
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001445- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1446 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1447 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001448
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001449- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1450 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1451 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001452
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001453- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001454
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001455- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1456 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001457
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001458- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1459 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1460
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001461- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1462
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001463- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001464 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001465
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001466- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001467 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001468
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001469- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1470
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001471- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1472 on cygwin and mingw32.
1473
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001474- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1475
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001476- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1477 module.
1478
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001479- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1480 installation scheme for all platforms.
1481
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001482- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001483 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001484
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001485- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1486 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1487 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1488
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001489- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1490 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1491 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1492
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001493- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1494
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001495- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1496
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001497- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1498 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1499
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001500- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1501 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1502 type pattern with the same value exists.
1503
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001504- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1505 when run from the command prompt).
1506
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001507- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1508 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1509
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001510- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1511 default sort).
1512
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001513- Added global runctx function to profile module
1514
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001515- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1516
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001517- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1518
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001519- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1520
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001521- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001522 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1523 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1524 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1525 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1526 accordingly.
1527
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001528- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1529 decoding standards.
1530
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001531- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1532 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1533 called for all requests.
1534
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001535- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1536 they are passed to the compiler.
1537
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001538- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1539 indent, width and depth.
1540
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001541- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1542 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1543
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001544- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1545 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1546
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001547- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1548
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001549- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1550
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001551- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1552
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001553- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1554 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1555
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001556- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001557 for better performance.
1558
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001559- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001560
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001561- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1562 a string).
1563
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001564- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1565
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001566- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1567
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001568- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1569
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001570- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1571
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001572- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1573 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1574 list of fieldnames.
1575
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001576- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1577 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1578
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001579- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1580
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001581- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1582 empty lists.
1583
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001584- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1585 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1586 and shelves.
1587
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001588- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1589 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1590
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001591- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001592 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1593 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001594
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001595- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1596 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001597 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001598
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001599- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001600 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1601 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1602
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001603- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1604 and removed in Py2.4.
1605
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001606- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1607
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001608- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1609
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001610Tools/Demos
1611-----------
1612
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001613- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1614 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1615
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001616- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1617
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001618- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1619 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1620 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1621 destination in situations where both files are given.
1622
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001623- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1624 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1625 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1626 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1627
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001628- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1629
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001630- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1631 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1632 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1633 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1634 now.
1635
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001636- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1637 in effect
1638
1639- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1640 C-c C-h
1641
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001642- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1643 -d option was given.
1644
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001645Build
1646-----
1647
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001648- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1649 build under OS X.
1650
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001651- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1652 --enable-profiling.
1653
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001654- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1655 is configured --with-tsc.
1656
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001657- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1658 on AMD64.
1659
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001660- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1661 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1662
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001663- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1664 removed.
1665
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001666- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1667 supported (see PEP 11).
1668
1669- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1670
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001671- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1672
1673- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1674 (see PEP 11).
1675
1676- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1677 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1678
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001679C API
1680-----
1681
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001682- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1683 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1684 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1685
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001686- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1687 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1688 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1689 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1690
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001691- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1692 generator objects.
1693
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001694- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1695 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001696 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1697 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001698
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001699- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1700 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1701
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001702- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1703 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1704 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1705 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1706 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1707
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001708- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1709 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1710 about 10% faster.
1711
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001712- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1713 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1714
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001715- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1716 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1717 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1718 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1719
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001720Windows
1721-------
1722
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001723- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1724 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1725 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1726 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1727
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001728- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1729 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1730 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1731
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001732
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001733What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1734===============================
1735
1736*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1737
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001738IDLE
1739----
1740
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001741- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1742 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1743 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1744 context-menu actions.
1745
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001746- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1747 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1748 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1749 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1750 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1751 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1752 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1753 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1754 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1755
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001756
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001757What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1758=============================================
1759
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001760*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001761
1762Core and builtins
1763-----------------
1764
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001765- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001766 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001767 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1768
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001769Extension modules
1770-----------------
1771
1772- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1773 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1774 than once. This has been fixed.
1775
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001776- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1777 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1778 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1779 call.
1780
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001781- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1782
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001783Library
1784-------
1785
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001786- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1787 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1788
1789- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1790 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1791 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1792 restored.
1793
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001794IDLE
1795----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001796
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001797- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001798
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001799Build
1800-----
1801
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001802- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1803 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1804
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001805C API
1806-----
1807
1808Windows
1809-------
1810
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001811- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1812 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1813
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001814- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1815
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001816Mac
1817---
1818
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001819- Various fixes to pimp.
1820
1821- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1822
1823- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1824 more problems than it solves.
1825
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001826
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1828=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001829
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001830*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1831
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001832Core and builtins
1833-----------------
1834
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001835- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1836 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1837
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001838- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1839 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001840 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841
1842- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1843 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1844 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001845 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001846
1847- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1848 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001849
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001850- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1851 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1852 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1853
1854- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001855 770247.
1856
1857- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001858
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001859Extension modules
1860-----------------
1861
1862- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1863 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1864
1865- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1866
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001867- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1868
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001869- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1870 contained within the _strptime module.
1871
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001872- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1873 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1874
1875- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001876 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1877
1878- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1879 the find_class attribute, if present.
1880
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001881- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001882
1883 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1884 (SF bug 763298).
1885
1886 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001887 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1888 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1889 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001890
1891 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1892
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001893Library
1894-------
1895
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001896- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1897
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001898- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1899 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1900 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1901 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1902 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1903 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1904 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1905 or Tester().
1906
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001907- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1908 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1909 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1910 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1911 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1912 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1913 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1914 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1915 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001916
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001917 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001918
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001919- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1920 weren't before was an oversight.
1921
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001922- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1923 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1924
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001925- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1926 when there are no lines.
1927
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001928- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1929 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1930
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001931- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1932 to child processes.
1933
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001934- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1935
1936- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1937
1938- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1939 xmlrpclib.
1940
1941- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1942 responses.
1943
1944- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1945 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1946
1947- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1948 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1949 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1950
1951- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1952 used as patterns.
1953
1954- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1955 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1956 than Tk 8.3.
1957
1958- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1959
1960- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001961
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001962Tools/Demos
1963-----------
1964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001965- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1966
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001967- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1968
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001969- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001970
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001971Build
1972-----
1973
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001974- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1975
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001976- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1977
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001978- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1979 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001980
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001981- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1982 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1983 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001984
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001985C API
1986-----
1987
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001988- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1989 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1990
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001991Windows
1992-------
1993
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001994- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1995 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1996 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1997 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1998 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1999 Python exception ::
2000
2001 thread.error: can't start new thread
2002
2003 is raised now.
2004
2005- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2006 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2007 instead of from DLL teardown.
2008
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002009Mac
2010---
2011
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002012- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002013 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002014 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2015 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2016 the executable in the bundle.
2017
2018- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002019
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002020- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2021
2022- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2023 on Panther.
2024
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002025What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2026================================
2027
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002028*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002029
2030Core and builtins
2031-----------------
2032
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002033- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2034 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2035 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2036 with the -i option.
2037
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002038- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2039 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2040
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002041- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2042 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2043
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002044- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2045 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2046 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2047 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2048 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2049 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2050 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2051 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2052 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2053 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2054 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2055 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2056 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002057
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002058- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2059 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2060 embedded in a lambda expression.
2061
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002062- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2063 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2064 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2065 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2066 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2067
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002068- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2069 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2070 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2071
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002072- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2073 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2074
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002075- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2076 It's writable again.
2077
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002078- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2079 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2080 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002081 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002082
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002083- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2084 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2085 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2086
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002087Extension modules
2088-----------------
2089
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002090- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2091 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2092
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002093- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2094 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2095 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2096 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2097
2098- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2099 collection.
2100
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002101- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2102 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2103 unique within a single program run.
2104
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002105- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2106 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2107
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002108- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2109 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2110
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002111- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2112 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002113
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002114- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2115
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002116- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2117 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2118
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002119- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2120 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2121 for many BSD-derived systems.
2122
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002123
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002124Library
2125-------
2126
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002127- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2128 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2129 primary ones:
2130
2131 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2132 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2133 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2134
2135 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2136 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2137 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2138 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2139 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2140 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2141
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002142- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2143 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2144 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2145 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2146 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2147 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2148 argument.
2149
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002150- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2151 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2152 in the archive.
2153
2154- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2155 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2156
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002157- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2158 569574).
2159
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002160- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2161 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2162 no more.
2163
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002164- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2165 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2166 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2167 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2168 code coverage.
2169
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002170- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2171 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2172 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002173 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2174 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002175
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002176- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2177 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2178 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002179 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002180
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002181- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2182
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002183- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2184 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2185 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2186 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2187
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002188- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2189 handling.
2190
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002191- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2192 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2193
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002194- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2195 in socket.py.
2196
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002197- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2198
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002199- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2200 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2201 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2202 opener with proxy support.
2203
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002204- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2205
2206- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2207
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002208Tools/Demos
2209-----------
2210
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002211- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2212
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002213- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2214
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002215- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2216 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002217
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002218- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2219 files.
2220
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002221Build
2222-----
2223
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002224- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002225 different root directory.
2226
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002227C API
2228-----
2229
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002230- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2231 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2232 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2233 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2234 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2235 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2236 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2237 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2238 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2239 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2240
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002241- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2242 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2243 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2244 from Python.
2245
2246
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002247New platforms
2248-------------
2249
2250None this time.
2251
2252Tests
2253-----
2254
2255- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2256 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2257
2258Windows
2259-------
2260
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002261- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2262
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002263- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2264 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2265 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2266 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2267 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2268 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2269 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2270 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2271 that's what it's for.
2272
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002273Mac
2274---
2275
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002276- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2277 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2278 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2279 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002280- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2281 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2282- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002283
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002284SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2285------------------------------------
2286
2287430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2288598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2289622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2290661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2291683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2292697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2293713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2294724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2295727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2296729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2297730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2298731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2299732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2300733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2301735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2302740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2303744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2304745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2305747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2306749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2307751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2308753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2309755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2310757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2311760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2312
2313
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002314What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2315================================
2316
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002317*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002318
2319Core and builtins
2320-----------------
2321
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002322- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2323 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2324
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002325- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2326 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2327 and cannot be strings).
2328
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002329- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2330 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2331 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2332 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2333
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002334- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2335 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2336 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2337 Python itself.
2338
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002339- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2340 the referenced object, if it has one.
2341
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002342- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2343 the thread started at
2344 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2345
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002346- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2347 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2348 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2349 placed on a list index.
2350
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002351- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2352 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2353 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2354 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2355
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002356- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2357 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2358 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2359 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2360 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2361 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2362 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2363
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002364- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2365 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2366 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2367 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2368 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2369
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002370- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2371 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002372
2373- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2374 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2375 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2376 #693195.)
2377
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002378- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2379 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002380
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002381- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002382 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002383 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2384 interpreter executions, would fail.
2385
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002386- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002387 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002388 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002389
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002390Extension modules
2391-----------------
2392
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002393- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2394 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2395 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2396 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2397
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002398- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2399 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2400
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002401- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2402 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2403 and Greg Chapman.)
2404
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002405- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2406 recursively.
2407
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002408- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002409 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2410 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2411 leaks.
2412
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002413- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2414
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002415- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2416 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2417 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2418 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2419 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2420 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2421 #705836.
2422
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002423- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002424 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2425
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002426- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2427 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2428 See SF bug #692416.
2429
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002430- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2431 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2432
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002433- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2434 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2435 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002436
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002437- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002438 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2439 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2440
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002441- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2442 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2443 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2444 timeouts to work properly.
2445
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002446Library
2447-------
2448
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002449- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2450 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2451 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2452 future release.
2453
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002454- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2455 for querying platform dependent features.
2456
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002457- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002458
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002459- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2460 pickle protocol versions.
2461
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002462- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2463 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2464 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2465
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002466- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2467
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002468- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2469 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2470 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2471 modules.
2472
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002473- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2474 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2475 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2476
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002477- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2478 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2479
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002480- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2481 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2482 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2483
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002484- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002485 MS Office extensions.
2486
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002487- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2488 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2489
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002490- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2491 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2492
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002493- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2494 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2495 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2496 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2497 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2498 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2499
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002500- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2501 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2502 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002503
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002504- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2505 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2506 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2507
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002508- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2509
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002510- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2511 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2512 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2513
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002514Tools/Demos
2515-----------
2516
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002517- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2518 See the module docstring for details.
2519
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002520Build
2521-----
2522
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002523- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2524 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002525
2526C API
2527-----
2528
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002529- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2530
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002531- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2532 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2533 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2534
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002535- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2536 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002537
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002538 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2539 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2540 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002541
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002542- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002543 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2544
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002545- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2546 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2547 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002548
2549New platforms
2550-------------
2551
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002552None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002553
2554Tests
2555-----
2556
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002557- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2558 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002559
2560Windows
2561-------
2562
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002563- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2564 function.
2565
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002566- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2567 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002568
2569Mac
2570---
2571
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002572- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2573 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002574
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002575- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2576 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002577
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002578- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2579 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2580 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002581
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002582- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002583 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2584 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002585
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002586- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2587 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002588
2589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002590What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2591=================================
2592
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002593*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002594
2595Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002596-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002597
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002598- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2599 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2600 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2601
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002602- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2603 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2604 (SF patch #664376.)
2605
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002606- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2607 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2608 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2609 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2610 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2611 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002612 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002613
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002614- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2615 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2616 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2617 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002618 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002619
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002620- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2621 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2622 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2623 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2624 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2625 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2626 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2627 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2628 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2629 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2630 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2631
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002632- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2633 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2634 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2635 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2636 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2637 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2638
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002639- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2640 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2641
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002642- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2643 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2644 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2645 case.)
2646
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002647- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2648 passed as unicode strings.
2649
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002650- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2651 See SF bug #683467.
2652
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002653- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2654 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2655
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002656- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2657
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002658- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2659
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002660- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2661 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2662 arguments.
2663
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002664- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2665 See SF bug #667147.
2666
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002667- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002668 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002669 See SF bug #676155.
2670
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002671- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002672 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002673 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2674 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2675 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2676 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2677 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2678 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002679
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002680Extension modules
2681-----------------
2682
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002683- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2684 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2685 tp_as_number pointer.
2686
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002687- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2688 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2689 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2690 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2691 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2692
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002693- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2694
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002695- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2696
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002697- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002698 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002699 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2700 patch #678531.)
2701
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002702- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2703 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2704
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002705- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2706 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2707
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002708- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2709
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002710- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2711 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2712 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2713
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002714- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2715
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002716- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2717 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2718
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002719- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002720
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002721- datetime changes:
2722
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002723 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2724
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002725 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2726 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2727 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2728 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2729 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2730 now.
2731
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002732 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002733 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2734 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002735
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002736 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002737 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002738 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2739 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2740 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2741 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002742
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002743 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2744 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2745 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002746 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2747
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002748 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2749 by a later example coded by Guido.
2750
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002751 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002752 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2753 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2754 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002755 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2756 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2757
2758 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2759 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2760 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2761 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2762 tzinfo subclass instance.
2763
2764 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2765 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2766 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2767 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2768 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2769 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2770 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2771 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002772
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002773 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2774 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2775 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2776 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2777 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002778 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2779
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002780 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002781
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002782 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2783 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2784 as a naive datetime object.
2785
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002786 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2787 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2788 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2789
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002790 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2791 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2792 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2793 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2794 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2795 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2796 comparison.
2797
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002798 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2799 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2800 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2801 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002802 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002803
2804 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002805
2806 and ::
2807
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002808 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2809
2810 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2811 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2812 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2813 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2814
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002815 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2816 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2817 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2818 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2819 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2820
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002821 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2822 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002823 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2824 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002826Library
2827-------
2828
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002829- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2830 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2831
2832- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2833 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2834 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2835 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2836 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2837 See PEP 307 for details.
2838
2839- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2840 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2841
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002842- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2843 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002844 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002845 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2846 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002847 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002848
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002849- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2850 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2851
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002852- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2853 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2854 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2855
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002856- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2857
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002858- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2859 exception.
2860
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002861- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2862 class.
2863
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002864- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2865 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2866 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2867
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002868- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2869 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2870
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002871- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002872 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2873 See SF bug #659228.
2874
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002875- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2876 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2877 See SF patch #651082.
2878
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002879- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002880
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002881- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2882 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2883
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002884- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002885 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002886
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002887- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2888 DOS paths from other platforms.
2889
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002890Tools/Demos
2891-----------
2892
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002893- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2894 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2895 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2896 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2897 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2898 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2899 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2900 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2901 example:
2902
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002903 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2904 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002905
2906 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2907
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002908
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002909Build
2910-----
2911
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002912- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2913 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2914 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002915 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2916
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002917 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2918
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002919- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2920 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2921 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2922 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2923 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2924 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2925 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2926 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2927 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2928
2929- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2930 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2931 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2932 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2933
2934- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2935 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2936
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002937C API
2938-----
2939
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002940- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2941 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002942
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002943- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2944 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2945 tp_as_number pointer.
2946
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002947- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2948 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2949 (SF #681367)
2950
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002951- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2952 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2953 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2954 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002955
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002956Tests
2957-----
2958
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002959- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002960 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2961 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2962 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2963 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2964 pydoc.)
2965
2966- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2967
2968- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002969
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002970Windows
2971-------
2972
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002973- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2974 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2975 time).
2976
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002977- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2978 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2979
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002980- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2981 release without strong cryptography.
2982
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002983- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002984 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002985
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002986- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2987 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2988
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002989Mac
2990---
2991
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002992- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2993 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002994
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002995- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2996 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2997 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002998
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002999- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3000 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003001
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003002- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3003 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3004 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3005 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003006
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003007- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003008 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3009 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3010 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003011
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003012
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003013What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014=================================
3015
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003016*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003020
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003021- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3022
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003023- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3024 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003025 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003026 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003027 a different meaning than before.
3028
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003029- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003030 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003031 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003032
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003033- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003034 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003035 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003036
3037- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3038 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3039 and deallocation.
3040
3041- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3042 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3043
3044- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3045 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3046 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3047 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3048 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3049
3050- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3051 now detected by the garbage collector.
3052
3053- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3054 [SF bug 519621]
3055
3056- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3057 identifier.
3058
3059- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3060 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3061 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3062 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3063 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3064 [SF bug 563060]
3065
3066- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3067 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3068 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3069 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3070 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3071
3072- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3073 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3074 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3075
3076- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3077
3078- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3079 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3080 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3081 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3082 state of the slots would be lost.)
3083
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003086
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003087- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003088 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3089 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3090 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3091 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003092 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3093 Jython 2.1.
3094
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003095- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003096 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003097 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3098 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3099 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3100 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3101 these, see PEP 302.
3102
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003103- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3104 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3105 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3106
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003107- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3108 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3109 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3110
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003111- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3112 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3113 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3114
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003115- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3116 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3117 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3118 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3119 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3120 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3121 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3122 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3123 releases or implementations.
3124
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003125- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003126 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3127 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003128
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003129- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3130 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3131
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003132- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3133 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3134 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3135
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003136- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3137 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3138
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003139- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3140 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003141 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3142 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003143
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003144- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3145 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3146 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3147 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3148 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3149
3150 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3151 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3152 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3153 pattern.
3154
3155 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3156 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3157 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3158 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3159
3160 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3161 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3162 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3163 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3164 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3165 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3166
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003167- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3168 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3169 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3170 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3171 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3172 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3173 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3174 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003175
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003176- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3177 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3178 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3179 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3180 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003181 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3182 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3183 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3184 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3185 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3186 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3187 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003188
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003189- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3190 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3191
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003192- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3193 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3194 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3195 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3196 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3197 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3198 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3199 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3200 to Zack Weinberg!
3201
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003202- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3203 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3204 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3205 type. This has been fixed now.
3206
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003207- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3208 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3209 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3210
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003211- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3212 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3213 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3214 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3215 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3216 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3217 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3218 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003219 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003220
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003221- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3222 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3223 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003224
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003225- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3226 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3227 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3228 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3229 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3230 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3231 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3232 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003233 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003234 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3235 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3236
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003237- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3238 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3239 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3240 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3241 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3242 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3243 this.)
3244
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003245- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3246 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003247 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003248 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003249 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3250 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003251 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3252 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003253
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003254- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3255 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3256 currently running.
3257
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003258- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3259 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3260 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3261 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3262
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003263- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3264 as directory names.
3265
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003266- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3267 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3268
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003269- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3270 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3271
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003272- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003273 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3274 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003275
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003276- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3277 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3278 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3279 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3280 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3281
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003282- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3283 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3284 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3285 removed.
3286
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003287- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3288 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3289 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3290
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003291- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3292 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3293 to __debug__.
3294
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003295- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3296 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3297 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3298
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003299- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3300 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3301 deprecated now.
3302
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003303- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3304 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3305 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003306
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003307- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3308 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3309 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3310 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3311 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003312
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003313- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3314 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3315
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003316- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3317 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3318 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003319 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003320 is backward compatible.
3321
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003322- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3323 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3324 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3325 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3326 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3327
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003328- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3329 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3330 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3331 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3332 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3333 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003334
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003335- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3336 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3337
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003338- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3339 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3340
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003341- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3342 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3343 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3344 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3345 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3346
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003347- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3348 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3349 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3350
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003351- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003352 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3353
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003354- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3355 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3356 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003357
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003358- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3359 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3360
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003361- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3362 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3363 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3364
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003365- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003367Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003369
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003370- Added three operators to the operator module:
3371 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3372 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3373 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3374
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003375- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3376
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003377- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3378 archives.
3379
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003380- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3381 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3382 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3383
3384 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3385
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003386- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3387 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3388 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003389 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003390
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003391- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3392 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3393 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3394 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003395 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3396 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3397 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3398 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003399
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003400- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3401 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003402
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003403- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3404
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003405- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3406 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3407
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003408- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3409 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3410 supported.
3411
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003412- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3413
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003414- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3415 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003416
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003417- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3418 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3419
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003420- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3421
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003422- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3423 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3424
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003425- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3426 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3427 functions but callable type objects.
3428
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003429- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003430 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003431 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003432
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003433- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3434 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003435
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003436- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3437 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003438
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003439- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3440 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3441 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3442 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3443
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003444- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3445 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003446
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003447- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3448 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3449 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3450 and __imul__.
3451
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003452- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003453 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3454 is called.
3455
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003456- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3457 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3458 interpreter was compiled.
3459
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003460- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3461 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3462 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003463 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003464 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3465 1, not 2.
3466
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003467- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3468 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3469 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3470 limit.
3471
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003472- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3473 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3474 bug #623464.
3475
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003476- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3477 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3478 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3479 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3480
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003481Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003483
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003484- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3485
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003486- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3487 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3488 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3489 with Python 2.3a2.
3490
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003491- os.path exposes getctime.
3492
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003493- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003494 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003495 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003496 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003497 unit tests of floating point results.
3498
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003499- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3500 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3501 has been increased.
3502
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003503- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3504 executed.
3505
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003506- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3507 postinstallation script.
3508
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003509- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3510 test the current module.
3511
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003512- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003513 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3514 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3515 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3516 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3517
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003518- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003519 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003520 Ward's Optik package.
3521
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003522- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3523 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3524 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3525 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3526
3527- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3528 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003529 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003530
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003531- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3532 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3533 shelf are binary pickles.
3534
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003535- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3536 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3537
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003538- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3539 modules are iterators now.
3540
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003541- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3542 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3543 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3544 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3545 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3546 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003547
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003548- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3549 with their entity value.
3550
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003551- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3552
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003553- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3554 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003555
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003556- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3557 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003558 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003559
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003560- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3561 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3562 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3563 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3564 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3565 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3566 main():
3567
3568 import locale
3569 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3570
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003571- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3572 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3573
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003574- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3575 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3576 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3577 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3578 to the new standard.
3579
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003580- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3581 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3582 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3583 an extension to the database.
3584
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003585- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3586 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3587 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3588 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003589 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003590
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003591- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003592 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003593
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003594- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3595 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3596 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3597 bounded integers.
3598
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003599- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3600 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3601 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3602 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3603 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3604 in existence.
3605
3606 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3607 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3608 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3609 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3610 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3611 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3612
3613 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3614 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3615 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3616 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3617
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003618- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3619 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3620 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3621
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003622- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3623
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003624- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3625 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3626 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3627 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3628
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003629- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3630 argument.
3631
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003632- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3633 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3634 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3635 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3636 [SF patch 560794].
3637
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003638- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3639 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3640 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003641 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3642 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3643 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003644
3645- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3646 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003647
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003648- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3649 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3650 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3651 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003652
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003653- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3654 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3655 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3656 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3657 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3658
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003659- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003660
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003661- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3662
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003663- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3664 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3665 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3666 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3667 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3668 identical to None.
3669
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003670- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3671 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3672 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3673 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3674 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3675 results now.
3676
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003677- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3678 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3679
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003680- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3681 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3682 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3683 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3684 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3685 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3686 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3687 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3688
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003689- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3690
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003691- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3692 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3693
3694- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3695 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3696 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3697 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3698 and other systems.
3699
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003700- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3701 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3702 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3703 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 +00003704 work well with these.
3705
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003706- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3707
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003708- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003709 connections.
3710
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003711- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3712 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3713 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3714
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003715- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3716 sets
3717
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003718- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3719 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3720 name.
3721
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003722- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3723 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3724 passed in.
3725
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003726- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003727 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003728 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3729 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003730
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003731- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3732
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003733- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3734
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003735- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3736 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3737 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3738
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003739- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3740 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3741 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3742 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003743 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003744
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003745- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003746 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003747 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003748
3749- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3750 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3751 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3752
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003753- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003754 the value of its expression argument.
3755
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003756- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3757 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3758 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3759
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003760- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3761 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3762 skipstone browser was included.
3763
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003764- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3765 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3766
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003769
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003770- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3771 names in addition to accepting file names.
3772
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003773- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3774 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3775 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3776 still used and useful.)
3777
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003778- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3779 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3780 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3781 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003782
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003783- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3784 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3785 the generated binary.
3786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003787Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003789
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003790- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3791
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003792- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3793 except in the hands of experts.
3794
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003795- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003796 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3797 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3798 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003799
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003800- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3801 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3802 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3803 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3804 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3805 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3806 builds.
3807
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003808- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3809 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3810 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3811 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3812 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3813 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3814 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3815 new type.
3816
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003817- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003818
3819 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3820 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3821 positive infinities.
3822
3823 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3824 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3825 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3826 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3827 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3828 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3829 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3830
3831 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3832
3833 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3834
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003835- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3836 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3837 size of the executable.
3838
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003839- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3840 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3841 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3842 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003843
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003844- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3845
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003846- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3847 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3848 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003849
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003850- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3851 well as Unix.
3852
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003853- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3854 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3855 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3856 modules in the README file for details.
3857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003858C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003860
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003861- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3862 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003863 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003864 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003865 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003866
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003867- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3868 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3869 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3870 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3871 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3872 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003873 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003874 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3875 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3876 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3877 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3878 aligned.)
3879
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003880- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3881 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3882 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3883
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003884- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3885 level.
3886
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003887- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3888 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3889 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3890 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3891 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3892
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003893- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3894 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3895 code.
3896
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003897- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3898 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3899 adjusting for negative indices.
3900
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003901- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3902 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3903 object.
3904
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003905- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3906 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3907 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3908
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003909- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3910 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003911
3912- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3913
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003914- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3915 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3916 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3917 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3918
3919- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3920
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003921- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003922
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003923- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003924 without going through the buffer API.
3925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003927
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003928- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3929 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3930 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3931 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3932
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003933- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3934 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3935
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003936- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003937 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3938
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003939New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003941
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003942- OpenVMS is now supported.
3943
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003944- AtheOS is now supported.
3945
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003946- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3947
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003948- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3949
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003950Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-----
3952
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003953- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3954 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3955 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003956
3957Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003959
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003960- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3961 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3962 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3963 bugs.
3964 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003965 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003966 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3967 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003968 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003969
3970- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003971 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003972
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003973- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3974 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3975
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003976- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3977 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003978 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003979 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3980
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003981- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3982 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3983 use files" uninstall option).
3984
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003985- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3986
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003987- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3988 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3989
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003990- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3991 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3992 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3993
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003994- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3995 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3996 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3997 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3998 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003999 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4000 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4001 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004002
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004003- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004004 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004005 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4006 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4007 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4008 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4009 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4010 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4011 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4012 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4013 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4014 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4015 work around.
4016
4017- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4018 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4019 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4020 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4021 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4022 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4023 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4024 specified with O_CREAT too).
4025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027----
4028
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004029- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004030
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004031- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4032 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4033 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4034
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004035- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4036 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4037 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4038
4039- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4040 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4041 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4042 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4043 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4044 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4045 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4046 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004047
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004048- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4049 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4050 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004051
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004052- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4053 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4054 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4055 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4056 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004057
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004058- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4059 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4060 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004061
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004062- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4063 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004064
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004065- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4066 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4067 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4068 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4069 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004070
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004071- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4072 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4073 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4074
4075- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4076 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4077 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004078
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004079- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4080 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4081 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4082 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004083 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004084
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004085- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4086 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004087
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004088- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4089 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004090
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004091- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004092 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004093 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4094 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004095
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004096
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004097What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004098===============================
4099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4101
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004102Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004104
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004105- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4106 with a custom metaclass.
4107
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004108Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004110
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004111- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4112 are proxies.
4113
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004114Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004116
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004117- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4118 very short strings.
4119
4120- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4121 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4122 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4123 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4124 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4125
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004126Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004129- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4130 close or delete time).
4131
4132- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4133 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4134
4135- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4136
4137- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004138 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004139
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004142
4143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145
4146C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148
4149New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004151
4152Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004154
4155Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004157
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004158- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4159
4160- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4161 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4162
4163- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4164 deleted at process exit time.
4165
4166- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4167 in backslash.
4168
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004169Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004171
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004172- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4173 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4174 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4175
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004176
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004177What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004178===========================
4179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4181
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004182Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004184
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004185- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4186 been extensively updated. See
4187
4188 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4189
4190 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4191
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004192- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4193 deleted!
4194
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004195- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4196 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4197 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4198 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4199 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4200
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004201- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4202
4203 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4204 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4205
4206 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4207 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4208 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4209 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4210 supported anyway.
4211
4212 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4213 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4214
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004215- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4216 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4217 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4218 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4219 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004220
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004221- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4222 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4223 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4224
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004225Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004228- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4229 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4230 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4231 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4232 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4233 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004234 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4235 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4236 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4237 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004238
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004239- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4240 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4241 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4242
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004243Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004246- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4247
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004248Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004250
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004251- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4252 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4253 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4254 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4255 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4256 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4257
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004258- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4259
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004260- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4261
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004262- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4263
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004264- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4265 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4266 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4267
4268- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4269
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004270Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004272
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004273- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4274 off a search on Google.
4275
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004278
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004279- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4280 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4281 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4282 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4283 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4284 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4285 other platforms should do likewise.
4286
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004287- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4288 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4289 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4290
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004293
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004294- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4295 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4296 producing key-value pairs.
4297
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004298- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004299 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004300 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4301 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4302 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4303 previously went unchallenged.
4304
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004305New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004307
4308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310
4311Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004313
4314Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004316
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004317- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4318 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004319
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004320- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4321 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4322 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4323 home.
4324
4325
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004326What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004327===========================
4328
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4330
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004331Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004333
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004334- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4335 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004336
4337 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004338 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004339
4340 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4341 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004342 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004343 This needs to be documented.
4344
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004345- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4346 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4347
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004348- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4349 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4350 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4351
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004352- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4353 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4354
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004355- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4356 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4357 class forbids it).
4358
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004359- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4360 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4361 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4362
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004363- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4364
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004365Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004368- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4369 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004370 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004371
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004372- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4373 (like 1 + '').
4374
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004375Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004378- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4379 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4380 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4381 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004382 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004383 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4384
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004385- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4386 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4387 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4388 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4389
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004390- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4391 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004392 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4393 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4394 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004395
4396- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4397 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004398
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004399- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4400 bytes on its input.
4401
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004402Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004404
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004405- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004406 convenience function.
4407
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004408- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4409 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4410 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004411 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4412 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4413 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4414 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4415 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4416 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004417
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004418- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4419 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4420 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4421 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4422
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004423- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4424 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4425 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4426
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004427- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4428 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4429 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4430 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4431
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004432- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4433 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004435 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4436 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4437 new -l and -e options.
4438
4439- statcache is now deprecated.
4440
4441- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4442 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004444 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4445 time properly taken into account.
4446
4447- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4448 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4449 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4450 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004452Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004454
4455Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004457
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004458- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4459 is built with libdb3 if available.
4460
4461- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004463C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004465
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004466- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4467 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4468 PySequence_Size().
4469
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004470- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4471
4472- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4473 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4474 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4475
4476- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4477 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4478
4479- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4480 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4481
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004484
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004485- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4486 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4487
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004488- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4489 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4490
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004491- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004493Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004495
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004496- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4497 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004499Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004502Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004504
4505- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4506 removed completely in the next release.
4507
4508- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4509 OSX.
4510
4511- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4512 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4513
4514- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4515
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004516
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004517What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004518===========================
4519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4521
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004522Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004524
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004525- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004526 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004527 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004528 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4529 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004530 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4531 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004532 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4533 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004534
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004535- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4536 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4537
4538- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4539 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4540
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004541Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004543
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004544- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4545 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4546 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4547 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4548 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4549 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4550 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4551 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4552
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004553- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4554 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4555 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4556 example).
4557
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004558- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004559 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004560 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004561 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004562
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004563- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4564 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4565 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004566 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004567
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004568- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4569 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4570 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4571 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4572 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4573 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4574
4575 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4576
4577 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4578
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004579Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004581
4582- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4583
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004584- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4585
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004586- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4587 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004588
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004589- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4590 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4591 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4592 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4593 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4594 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004595 attributes.
4596
4597- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4598 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4599 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004600
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004601- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4602 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4603 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004605- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4606 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4607 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004608 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4609 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4610
4611- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4612 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004613
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004614Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004616
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004617- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4618 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4619
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004620- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4621 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4622 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4623 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4624
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004625- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4626 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4627 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4628 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4629
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004630 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4631 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4632 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4633 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4634 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4635 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4636 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4637 without losing information).
4638
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004639- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004640 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4641 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4642 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4643 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4644 module).
4645
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004646 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004647 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4648 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4649 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4650 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004651
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004652- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004653 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4654 encoding.
4655
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004656- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4657 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004660 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4661
4662- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4663 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4664 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4665 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4666
4667- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4668
4669- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4670 ON, and OFF.
4671
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004672- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4673 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4674
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004675Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004677
4678- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4679 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4680 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004681
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004682- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4683 been added: -X and -E.
4684
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004687
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004688- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4689 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4690
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004691C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004693
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004694- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4695 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4696 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4697 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4698 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4699
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004700- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4701 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4702 as long) arguments.
4703
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004704- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4705 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4706 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4707 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4708 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4709 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4710
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004711- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4712 input.
4713
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004714New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004716
4717Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004719
4720Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004722
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004723- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4724 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4725 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4726
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004727- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4728 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4729 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004730 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004731
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4733 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4734 import signal
4735 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004738 while 1:
4739 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004741 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4742 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4743 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4744 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004745
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004746
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004747What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4748===========================
4749
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4751
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004752Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004754
4755- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4756 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4757 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4758
4759- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4760 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4761 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4762 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4763 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4764 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4765 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004766
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004767- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004768 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004769 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4770 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4771 associate a docstring with a property.
4772
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004773- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4774 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4775 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4776 other built-in object types.
4777
4778- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4779 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4780 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4781 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4782 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4783
4784- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4785 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4786
4787- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4788 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004789 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004790 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4791 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4792 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4793 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4794 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4795
4796- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4797 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4798 class.
4799
4800- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4801 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4802 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4803 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4804
4805- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4806 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4807 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4808 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4809
4810- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4811 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4812
4813- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4814 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4815 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4816 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4817 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004818 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004819 with the same value as s.
4820
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004821- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4822
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004825
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004826- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4827
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004828- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4829 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4830 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4831 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4832 objects.
4833
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004834- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4835 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004836 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4837 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4838
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004839- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4840 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4841 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4842
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004845
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004846- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4847 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4848 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4849 by the instances.
4850
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004851- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4852 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4853 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4854
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004855- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4856 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4857 before the entire comparison is complete.
4858
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004859- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4860 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4861 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4862
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004863- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4864 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4865 getwriter().
4866
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004867- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4868 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4869
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004870- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004871 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4872 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4873
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004874- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4875 iterable object.
4876
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004877- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4878 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004879
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004880- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4881 authentication.
4882
4883- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4884 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004885
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004886- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004887 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4888 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4889 a sample driver.)
4890
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004891Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004893
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004894- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4895 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4896 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4897 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4898 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4899 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4900 kernel has large file support.
4901
4902- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4903 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4904 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4905 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4906 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4907
4908- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4909 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4910 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4911
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004912C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004914
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004915- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4916 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4917
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004918New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004920
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004921- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4922 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4923
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004924Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004926
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004927- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4928 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4929 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4930 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4931 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4932
4933- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4934 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4935 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4936 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4937
4938- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4939 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4940
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004941Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004943
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004944- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004945 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4946 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004947
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004949What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4950===========================
4951
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4953
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004954Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004956
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004957- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4958 big to represent as a C double.
4959
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004960- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4961 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4962 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4963 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4964 restriction).
4965
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004966- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4967 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4968 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4969 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4970 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4971
4972 >>> dir([])
4973 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4974 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4975 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4976 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4977 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4978 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4979 'reverse', 'sort']
4980
4981 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004983- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004984 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4985 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4986 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4987 OverflowError exception.
4988
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004989- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004990 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004991 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4992 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4993 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4994 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4995 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004996 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4998 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4999
5000 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5001 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5002 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5003 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005004
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005005- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005006 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5007 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5008 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5009 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5010 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5011 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5012 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5013 once it is created.
5014
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005015- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5016 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5017 (key, value) pairs.
5018
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005019- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005020 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5021 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5022
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005023- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5024 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5025 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5026 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5027 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005029- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005030 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5031 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5032
5033 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5034
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005035- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005036 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5037
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005038Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005040
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005041- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005042 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5043 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005044
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005045- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5046 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5047 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5048 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5049 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5050 in this area anymore).
5051
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005052- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5053 threading.Timer.
5054
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005055- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5056 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5057
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005058- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005059 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5060
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005061- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005062 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5063 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5064 converted to Python longs.
5065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005066- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005067 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5068
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005069- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5070 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5071 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5072
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005073Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005075
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005076- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5077 division operators as per PEP 238.
5078
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005079Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005081
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005082- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5083 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5084 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5085 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5086
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005087C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005089
5090- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005091
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005092- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5093 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005094 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005095
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5097 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005098 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005100
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005101- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005102 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5103 module:
5104
5105 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005106
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005107 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5108 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005109
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005110 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5111 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005112
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005113 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5114
5115 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5116
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005117- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005118 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5119 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5120 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005122New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005124
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005125- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5126 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5127 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5128 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5129 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005130
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005131Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005133
5134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005136
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005137- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5138 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5139 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5140 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005141 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5142 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5143 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5144 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5145 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005146
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005147- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005148 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5149
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005150
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005151What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5152===========================
5153
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5155
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005156Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005158
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005159- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5160 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5161
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005162- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5163 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5164 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005165
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005166- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5167 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5168 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5169 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005170
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005171- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5172
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005174
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005175Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005177
5178- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005179 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005180 the module docstring for details.
5181
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005182Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005184
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005185- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005186 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5187 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5188 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005189
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005190- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5191 Nick Mathewson.
5192
5193Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005195
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005196- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5197 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5198 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5199 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5200 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5201 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5202 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5203 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5204
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005205- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5206 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5207 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5208 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5209
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005210- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5211 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5212 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5213 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5214 come a long way).
5215
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005216- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5217 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5218 write filters for these warnings).
5219
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005220- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5221 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5222 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5223 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5224 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5225
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005226- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5227 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5228 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5229 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5230 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5231 older distribution.
5232
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005233Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005235
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005236- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5237 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005238 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005239
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005240- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5241 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5242 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5243
5244- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5245
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005246- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5247
5248- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5249
5250- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005253
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005254- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5255
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005256New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005258
5259C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005261
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005262- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5263 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5264 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5265 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5266 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5267 against buffer overruns.
5268
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005269- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005270 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5271 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005272 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5273 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5274 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5275
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005276- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5277 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5278 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5279 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5280 deprecated.
5281
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005282Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005284
5285- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5286 relevant is found.
5287
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005288
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005289What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005290===========================
5291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005292*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5293
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005294Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005296
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005297- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5298 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5299 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5300 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5301 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5302 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5303 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5304 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005305 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005306 repaired.
5307
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005308- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005309 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005310 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5311 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5312 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5313 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5314 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5315 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5316 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5317 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5318
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005319- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5320 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5321 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5322 leading BMO character).
5323
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005324- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5325 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5326 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5327
5328 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5329 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5330 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005331
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005332 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5333 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5334 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5335 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5336 for various simple to use conversions.
5337
5338 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5339 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5340
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5342 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5343 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5344 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5345 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5346 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5347 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5348 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5349 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5350 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5351 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5352 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5353 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5354 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5355 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005356
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005357- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5358 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5359 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005360 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005361 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005362
5363 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005364 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5365 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5366 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5367 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5368 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005369 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5370 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005371
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005372 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5373 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5374 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005375 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005376
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005377- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5378 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5379 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5380 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5381 floating arithmetic,
5382
5383 x = 9007199254740992.0
5384 print long(x)
5385
5386 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5387 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5388 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5389 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5390 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5391 functions are of good quality).
5392
5393 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5394 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5395 algorithms to break.
5396
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005397- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5398 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5399 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5400 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5401 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5402 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5403 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5404 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5405 order.
5406
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005407- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5408 operation along the most common code paths.
5409
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005410- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5411 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5412
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005413- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5414 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5415 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5416 {}.update(UserDict())
5417
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005418- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5419 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5420 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5421 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5422 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5423 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5424 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5425 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5426
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005427- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005428 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005430 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005431 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5432 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005433 join() method of strings
5434 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005435 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5436 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005438 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005439
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005440- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5441 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5442
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005443- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5444 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5445
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005446- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5447 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5448 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5449 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5450
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005451- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5452 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005453 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005454 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5455 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005456
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005457- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5458
5459
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005462
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005463- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005464 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005465 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5466 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5467
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005468- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5469 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5470
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005471- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5472 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5473 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5474 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5475
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005476- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5477 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5478 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5479
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005480- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5481
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005482- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5483
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005484- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5485 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5486 that are still imported into string.py).
5487
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005488- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5489
5490- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5491 Now it does.
5492
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005493- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5494
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005495- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5496 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5497 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5498 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5499 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005500 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5501 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005502
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005503- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5504 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5505 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5506 'help(object)'.
5507
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005510
5511- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005512 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005513 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5514 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5515
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005516- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005517 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5518 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005519
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005520C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005522
5523- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5524 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525
5526----
5527
5528**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**