blob: bcc696ae975212ec7b6a6d447809a5c7060b2c94 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000015- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
16 like their int counterparts.
17
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000018- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
19 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
20 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
21 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
22 for a longer write-up of the problem).
23
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000024- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
25 serializing floats.
26
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000027- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
28 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
29 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
30
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000031- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
32 278.
33
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000034- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
35 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
36 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
37 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
38 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
39 PyNumber_*().
40 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
41
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000042- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
43 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
44 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
45 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
46
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000047- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
48 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
49 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
50 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
51 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
52
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000053- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
54 disabled caused a crash.
55
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000056- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
57 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
58
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000059- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
60 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
61
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000062- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
63
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000064- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000065 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
66 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
67 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000068
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000069- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
70
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000071- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
72 returning None.
73
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000074- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
75 ('\') with a specific error message.
76
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000077- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
78
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000079- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
80 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
81
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000082- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000083 an ferror() call.
84
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000085- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
86 list.sort().
87
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000088- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
89 (2+3) --> (5).
90
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000091- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
92
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000093- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
94 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000095
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000096- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
97 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
98 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
99
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000100Extension Modules
101-----------------
102
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000103- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
104
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000105- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
106 if available on the platform.
107
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000108- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
109 available on the platform.
110
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000111- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
112 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
113
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000114- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
115
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000116- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
117 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
118 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
119
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000120- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
121
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000122- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
123 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
124
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000125- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
126 file size.
127
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000128- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
129
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000130- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
131 {remove_history,replace_history}
132
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000133- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
134 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000135
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000136- stat_float_times is now True.
137
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000138- array.array objects are now picklable.
139
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000140- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
141 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
142
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000143- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
144 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
145 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
146
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000147- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
148 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149
150Library
151-------
152
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000153- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
154 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
155
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000156- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
157 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
158
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000159- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
160
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000161- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
162 error messages.
163
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000164- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
165
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000166- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
167 Bug #1224621.
168
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000169- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
170 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
171 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
172 terminates by raising StopIteration.
173
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000174- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
175
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000176- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
177 component of the path.
178
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000179- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
180 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
181 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
182 class at all.
183
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000184- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
185 files to PyPI.
186
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000187- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
188 them to PyPI.
189
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000190- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
191 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
192 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
193 work as expected.
194
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000195- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
196 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
197
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000198- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
199 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
200
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000201- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
202
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000203- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
204 to build.
205
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000206- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
207 symbolic links on Windows.
208
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000209- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
210 profile.py if available.
211
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000212- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
213
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000214- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
215 in LWPCookieJar.
216
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000217- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
218
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000219- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
220
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000221- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
222
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000223- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
224
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000225- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
226
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000227- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
228
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000229- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
230
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000231- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
232
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000233- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
234 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
235 be exploited in various ways.
236
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000237- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
238
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000239- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
240
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000241- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
242
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000243- Enhancements to the csv module:
244
245 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
246 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
247 PEP 305.
248 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
249 reporting.
250 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
251 dictates.
252 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000253 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000254 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000255 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
256 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000257 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
258 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000259 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000260 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
261 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
262 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
263 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
264 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
265 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
266 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
267 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
268 without first creating a dialect class.
269 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
270 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
271 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000272 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000273 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
274 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000275 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
276 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
277 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
278 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000279 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
280 This has been fixed.
281
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000282- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
283 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
284 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
285 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
286
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000287- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
288
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000289- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
290 (Bug #951915).
291
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000292- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
293 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
294 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
295 encoding alias table
296
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000297- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
298
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000299- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
300 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
301
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000302- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
303
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000304- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
305
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000306- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
307
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000308- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
309
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000310- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
311
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000312- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
313 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
314 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
315
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000316- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000317 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000318
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000319- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
320 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
321 tokenizer with very long source lines.
322
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000323- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
324 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
325
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000326- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
327 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000328
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000329- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
330 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
331
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000332- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
333 correctly.
334
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000335- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
336 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
337 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
338 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
339 between two lines.
340
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000341
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000342Build
343-----
344
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000345- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
346 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
347 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000348 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000349
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000350- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
351 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
352 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
353
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000354- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
355
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000356- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
357 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
358
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000359- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
360 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
361 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
362 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
363 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
364 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
365 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
366 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
367
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000368- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
369 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
370 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
371 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
372
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000373
374C API
375-----
376
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000377- Removed PyRange_New().
378
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000379
380Tests
381-----
382
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000383- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000384
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000385
386Documentation
387-------------
388
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000389- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
390
391- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
392
393- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
394
395- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
396
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000397- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
398 Closes bug #1166582.
399
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000400- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
401 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
402 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
403
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000404Mac
405---
406
407
408
409Tools/Demos
410-----------
411
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000412- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
413
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000414- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000415
416
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000417What's New in Python 2.4 final?
418===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000419
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000420*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000421
422Core and builtins
423-----------------
424
425- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
426 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
427 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
428
429
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000430What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
431==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000432
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000433*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000434
435Core and builtins
436-----------------
437
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000438- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
439 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
440 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
441
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000442
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000443Library
444-------
445
446- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
447 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
448 raised is re-raised.
449
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000450- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
451 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
452
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000453- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
454 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
455 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
456 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
457 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
458 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
459 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
460 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
461 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
462 by the slice are recomputed now.
463
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000464- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000465
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000466Build
467-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000468
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000469- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
470 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
471 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000472
473C API
474-----
475
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000476- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
477
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000478
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000479What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
480================================
481
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000482*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000483
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000484License
485-------
486
487The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
488is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
489changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
490Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
491intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
492durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
493the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
494License::
495
496 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
497
498says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
499to Python 2.1.1.
500
501The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
502License Version 2.
503
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000504Core and builtins
505-----------------
506
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000507- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
508 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
509 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
510 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
511 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
512 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
513 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
514 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
515 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
516 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
517
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000518- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000519
520Extension Modules
521-----------------
522
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000523- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
524 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
525 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
526 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000527
528Library
529-------
530
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000531- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
532 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
533 returned.
534
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000535- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
536
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000537- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
538 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
539
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000540- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
541
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000542- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
543 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000544
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000545- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
546
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000547- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
548
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000549- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000550 the source code is updated and reloaded.
551
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000552Build
553-----
554
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000555- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000556
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000557What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
558================================
559
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000560*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000561
562Core and builtins
563-----------------
564
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000565- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000566 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
567
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000568- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
569 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
570 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
571 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
572
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000573- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
574 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
575
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000576- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
577 constant.
578
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000579- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
580 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
581 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
582 large), and to anomalies such as
583 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
584 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
585 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
586 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000587
588Extension modules
589-----------------
590
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000591- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
592 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000593 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
594 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
595 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000596
597Library
598-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000599
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000600- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000601 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000602 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
603 --swig-cpp.
604
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000605- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
606 it is set.
607
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000608- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000609
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000610- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
611 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
612 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
613 Closes bug #1039270.
614
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000615- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000616
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000617 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000618 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
619 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
620 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
621 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
622 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
623 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
624 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
625 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
626 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
627 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
628 + Updates to documentation.
629
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000630- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
631 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
632 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
633 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
634
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000635- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000636
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000637- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
638 applications should use the getmember function.
639
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000640- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
641
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000642- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
643 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
644 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
645 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
646 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
647 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
648 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
649 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
650 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
651
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000652- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
653 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000654 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000655
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000656- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
657 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
658 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
659 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
660 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
661 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
662 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
663 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000664
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000665- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
666 the new public features (of which there are many).
667
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000668- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000669 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
670 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
671 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
672 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000673 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000674
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000675- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
676
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000677- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
678 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
679 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
680 options.
681
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000682- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
683 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
684 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
685 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
686 conditions under which non-string values work.
687
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000688Build
689-----
690
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000691- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
692 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
693 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
694
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000695- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
696 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
697 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
698 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
699 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000700
701C API
702-----
703
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000704- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
705 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
706
707- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
708
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000709- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
710 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
711 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
712 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
713 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
714 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
715 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
716 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
717 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
718
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000719- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
720
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000721- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
722 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
723 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000724
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000725Tests
726-----
727
728- test__locale ported to unittest
729
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000730Mac
731---
732
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000733- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
734 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
735 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000736
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000737Tools/Demos
738-----------
739
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000740- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
741 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
742 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
743 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
744 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000745
746
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000747What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
748=================================
749
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000750*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000751
752Core and builtins
753-----------------
754
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000755- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000756 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
757
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000758- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
759 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
760 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
761 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
762 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
763 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
764 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
765 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000766 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
767 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
768 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
769 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
770 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000771
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000772- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
773 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
774 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
775 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
776 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
777
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000778- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
779
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000780- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
781 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
782
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000783- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
784 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
785 modified the list.
786
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000787- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
788 functions is now writable.
789
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000790- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
791 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
792 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
793 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
794
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000795- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
796 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
797 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
798 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
799 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000800
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000801- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
802 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
803
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000804Extension modules
805-----------------
806
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000807- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
808
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000809- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
810 data.
811
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000812- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
813 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
814 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
815 supposed to have been truncated away.
816
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000817- Added socket.socketpair().
818
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000819- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
820 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
821
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000822- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000823 versions of Python, have now been removed.
824
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000825Library
826-------
827
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000828- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000829 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000830
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000831- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
832 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
833
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000834- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
835 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
836
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000837- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
838
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000839- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
840 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000841
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000842- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
843 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
844
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000845- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
846
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000847- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
848
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000849- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
850
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000851- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
852 Percivall.
853
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000854- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
855 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
856
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000857- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
858 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
859 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000860 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000861
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000862- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
863 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
864 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
865 and exponent.
866
867- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
868
869- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
870 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
871 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
872
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000873- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
874 to the readline module.
875
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000876- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000877 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
878 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000879
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000880- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
881 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
882 contains symlinks.
883
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000884- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
885 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
886
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000887- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
888 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
889 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
890
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000891- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
892 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
893 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
894 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
895 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
896 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
897 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
898 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
899 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
900 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
901 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
902 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
903 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
904
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000905- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
906
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000907Tools/Demos
908-----------
909
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000910- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
911 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
912
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000913- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
914
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000915Build
916-----
917
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000918- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
919 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
920 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
921 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
922 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
923 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
924 plans to do so.
925
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000926- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
927 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
928
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000929- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
930 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
931
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000932- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
933 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
934
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000935- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
936 GNU/k*BSD systems.
937
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000938- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
939 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
940
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000941C API
942-----
943
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000944..
945
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000946Documentation
947-------------
948
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000949- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
950 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
951
952- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
953 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
954 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000955
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000956New platforms
957-------------
958
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000959- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
960
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000961Tests
962-----
963
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000964..
965
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000966Windows
967-------
968
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000969- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
970 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
971 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
972 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
973 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
974 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
975 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
976 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
977 the problem.
978
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000979Mac
980---
981
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000982..
983
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000984
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000985What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
986=================================
987
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000988*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000989
990Core and builtins
991-----------------
992
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000993- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
994 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
995 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
996 sensitive code.
997
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000998- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000999 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001000
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001001 @staticmethod
1002 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001003
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001004 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001005
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001006- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1007 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1008 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1009 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1010 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1011 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1012 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1013 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1014 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1015 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1016 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1017
1018 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1019 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1020 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1021 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1022 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1023 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1024 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1025
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001026- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1027 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1028
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001029- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001030 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001031
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001032- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001033 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001034 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1035
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001036- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001037 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1038 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1039
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001040- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1041 types that support garbage collection.
1042
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001043- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1044
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001045- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1046 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1047 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1048 Jython.
1049
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001050- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1051
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001052- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1053 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1054
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001055- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1056 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1057 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001058
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001059- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1060 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1061 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1062
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001063Extension modules
1064-----------------
1065
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001066- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1067
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001068Library
1069-------
1070
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001071- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1072 TIS-620
1073
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001074- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1075 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1076 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1077 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1078 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1079 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1080 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1081 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1082 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1083 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1084
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001085- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1086
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001087- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1088 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1089 same as when the argument is omitted).
1090 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1091
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001092- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1093
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001094- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1095 schemes are offered.
1096
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001097- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1098
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001099- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1100 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1101 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1102
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001103- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1104
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001105- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1106 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1107
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001108- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1109 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1110 when dummy_threading is being used.
1111
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001112- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1113 from a tarfile.
1114
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001115- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001116 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001117
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001118- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1119 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1120 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1121 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1122
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001123- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1124 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1125
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001126- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1127 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1128 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1129 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1130 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1131 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1132 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1133 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1134 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1135 by some other method in progress).
1136
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001137- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1138 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1139 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001140
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001141- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1142
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001143- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1144 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1145 AM Kuchling.
1146
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001147- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1148 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1149 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1150
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001151- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1152 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1153 instead of unsigned.
1154
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001155- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001156 no longer part of the public API.
1157
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001158- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1159 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1160 string methods of the same name).
1161
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001162- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001163 SF patch 945642.
1164
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001165- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1166
1167 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1168
1169 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1170 DocTestSuites.
1171
1172- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1173 that provide thread-local data.
1174
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001175- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1176 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1177
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001178- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1179
1180- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1181 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1182 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1183
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001184- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1185
1186 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1187 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1188 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001189
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001190 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1191 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1192 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1193 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1194
1195 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1196 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1197
1198 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1199 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1200 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1201 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1202
1203 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1204 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1205 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1206 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1207 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1208
1209 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1210 wrapping help output.
1211
1212 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1213 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1214 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001215
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001216C API
1217-----
1218
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001219- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1220 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1221 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1222 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1223 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1224 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1225 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1226 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1227 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1228 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1229 its visible semantics have not changed.
1230
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001231- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1232 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1233
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001234Documentation
1235-------------
1236
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001237- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001238
1239 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001240 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001241
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001242 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001243
1244 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1245
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001246- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001247
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001248Tests
1249-----
1250
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001251- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001252 platforms that use the Makefile.
1253
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001254- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1255 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1256 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1257
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001258
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001259What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1260=================================
1261
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001262*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001263
1264Core and builtins
1265-----------------
1266
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001267- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1268 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1269 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1270 objects now (one object instead of three).
1271
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001272- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1273 Windows DLLs.
1274
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001275- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1276 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001277
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001278- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1279 a new .pyc magic.
1280
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001281- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1282 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1283 be there.
1284
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001285- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1286 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1287 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1288
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001289- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1290 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1291 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1292
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001293- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1294
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001295- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1296 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1297 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001298
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001299- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1300 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1301
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001302- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1303
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001304- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001305 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001306
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001307- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1308
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001309- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1310
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001311- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1312 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1313
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001314- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1315 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1316 Fixes bug #858016 .
1317
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001318- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1319 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1320 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1321
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001322- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1323 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1324 improves their performance (about 35%).
1325
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001326- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1327 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1328 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1329
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001330- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1331 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1332 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1333 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1334
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001335- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1336 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001337 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001338 length is not known).
1339
1340- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1341 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001342 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1343 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001344 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1345
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001346- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1347 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1348
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001349- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1350 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1351 keyword arguments.
1352
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001353- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1354 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1355 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1356
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001357- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1358 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1359 cases.
1360
1361- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1362 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1363 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1364 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1365 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1366 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1367 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1368 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1369 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1370 a release build.
1371
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001372- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1373 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1374
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001375- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001376 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001377
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001378- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1379 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1380 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1381 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1382 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1383 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1384 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1385 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1386 destroyed.
1387
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001388- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1389 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1390 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1391 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1392 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1393 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1394 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1395 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1396
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001397- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1398 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1399 character other than a space.
1400
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001401- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1402 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1403 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1404 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1405 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1406 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1407 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1408 attributes with the same name.
1409
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001410- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1411 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1412 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1413 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1414 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1415 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1416 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1417 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1418 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1419 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1420 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1421 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1422 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1423 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001424
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001425- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1426 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1427 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1428 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1429 This has been repaired.
1430
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001431- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1432
1433- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1434
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001435- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1436 over a sequence.
1437
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001438- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001439 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001440
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001441- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1442
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001443- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1444 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1445 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1446 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1447 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1448 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1449 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1450 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1451
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001452- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1453 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1454 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1455
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001456- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1457 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1458 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1459 freelist.
1460
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001461- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1462 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1463
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001464- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1465 number.
1466
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001467- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1468 a TypeError exception.
1469
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001470- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1471 820195.
1472
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001473- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1474 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1475 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1476
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001477- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001478 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1479 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001480
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001481- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1482 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1483 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1484
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001485- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1486 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001487 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001488
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001489- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001490 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1491 the first call.
1492
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001493
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001494Extension modules
1495-----------------
1496
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001497- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1498 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1499
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001500- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1501 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1502 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1503 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1504 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1505 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1506 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001507
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001508- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1509
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001510- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1511
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001512- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1513 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1514
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001515- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1516 fewer false positives.
1517
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001518- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1519 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1520
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001521- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001522 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1523
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001524- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001525 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001526 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001527 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1528 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001529
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001530- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1531 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1532 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1533 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1534
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001535- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1536 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1537 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1538 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1539 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1540 #897625.
1541
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001542- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1543 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1544
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001545- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1546 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1547 and pops on either side of the deque.
1548
1549- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1550 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1551
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001552- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1553 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1554 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1555 other functions that expect a function argument.
1556
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001557- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1558
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001559- os.getsid was added.
1560
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001561- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1562 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1563 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1564
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001565- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1566
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001567- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1568
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001569- readline.clear_history was added.
1570
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001571- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1572
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001573- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1574
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001575- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1576
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001577- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1578
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001579- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1580
1581- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1582
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001583- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1584
1585- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1586
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001587- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1588 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1589 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1590
1591- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1592 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1593 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1594 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1595 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1596 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1597 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1598
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001599- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1600 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1601 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1602 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001603
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001604- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001605 iterators from a single iterable.
1606
1607- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1608 of raising a TypeError exception.
1609
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001610- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1611 as parameter.
1612
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001613Library
1614-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001615
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001616- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1617 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1618 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001619
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001620- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1621 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1622 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001623
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001624- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001625
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001626- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1627 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001628
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001629- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1630 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1631
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001632- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1633
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001634- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001635 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001636
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001637- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001638 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001639
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001640- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1641
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001642- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1643 on cygwin and mingw32.
1644
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001645- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1646
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001647- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1648 module.
1649
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001650- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1651 installation scheme for all platforms.
1652
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001653- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001654 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001655
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001656- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1657 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1658 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1659
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001660- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1661 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1662 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1663
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001664- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1665
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001666- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1667
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001668- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1669 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1670
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001671- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1672 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1673 type pattern with the same value exists.
1674
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001675- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1676 when run from the command prompt).
1677
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001678- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1679 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1680
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001681- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1682 default sort).
1683
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001684- Added global runctx function to profile module
1685
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001686- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1687
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001688- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1689
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001690- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1691
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001692- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001693 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1694 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1695 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1696 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1697 accordingly.
1698
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001699- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1700 decoding standards.
1701
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001702- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1703 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1704 called for all requests.
1705
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001706- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1707 they are passed to the compiler.
1708
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001709- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1710 indent, width and depth.
1711
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001712- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1713 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1714
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001715- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1716 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1717
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001718- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1719
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001720- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1721
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001722- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1723
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001724- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1725 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1726
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001727- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001728 for better performance.
1729
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001730- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001731
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001732- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1733 a string).
1734
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001735- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1736
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001737- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1738
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001739- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1740
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001741- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1742
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001743- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1744 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1745 list of fieldnames.
1746
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001747- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1748 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1749
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001750- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1751
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001752- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1753 empty lists.
1754
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001755- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1756 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1757 and shelves.
1758
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001759- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1760 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1761
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001762- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001763 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1764 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001765
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001766- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1767 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001768 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001769
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001770- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001771 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1772 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1773
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001774- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1775 and removed in Py2.4.
1776
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001777- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1778
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001779- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1780
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001781Tools/Demos
1782-----------
1783
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001784- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1785 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1786
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001787- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1788
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001789- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1790 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1791 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1792 destination in situations where both files are given.
1793
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001794- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1795 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1796 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1797 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1798
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001799- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1800
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001801- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1802 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1803 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1804 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1805 now.
1806
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001807- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1808 in effect
1809
1810- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1811 C-c C-h
1812
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001813- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1814 -d option was given.
1815
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001816Build
1817-----
1818
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001819- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1820 build under OS X.
1821
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001822- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1823 --enable-profiling.
1824
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001825- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1826 is configured --with-tsc.
1827
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001828- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1829 on AMD64.
1830
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001831- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1832 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1833
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001834- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1835 removed.
1836
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001837- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1838 supported (see PEP 11).
1839
1840- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1841
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001842- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1843
1844- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1845 (see PEP 11).
1846
1847- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1848 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1849
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001850C API
1851-----
1852
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001853- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1854 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1855 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1856
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001857- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1858 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1859 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1860 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1861
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001862- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1863 generator objects.
1864
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001865- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1866 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001867 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1868 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001869
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001870- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1871 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1872
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001873- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1874 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1875 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1876 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1877 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1878
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001879- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1880 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1881 about 10% faster.
1882
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001883- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1884 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1885
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001886- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1887 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1888 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1889 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1890
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001891Windows
1892-------
1893
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001894- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1895 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1896 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1897 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1898
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001899- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1900 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1901 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1902
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001903
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001904What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1905===============================
1906
1907*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1908
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001909IDLE
1910----
1911
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001912- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1913 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1914 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1915 context-menu actions.
1916
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001917- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1918 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1919 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1920 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1921 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1922 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1923 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1924 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1925 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1926
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001927
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001928What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1929=============================================
1930
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001931*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001932
1933Core and builtins
1934-----------------
1935
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001936- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001937 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001938 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1939
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001940Extension modules
1941-----------------
1942
1943- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1944 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1945 than once. This has been fixed.
1946
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001947- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1948 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1949 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1950 call.
1951
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001952- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1953
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001954Library
1955-------
1956
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001957- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1958 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1959
1960- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1961 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1962 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1963 restored.
1964
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001965IDLE
1966----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001967
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001968- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001969
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001970Build
1971-----
1972
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001973- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1974 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1975
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001976C API
1977-----
1978
1979Windows
1980-------
1981
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001982- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1983 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1984
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001985- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1986
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001987Mac
1988---
1989
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001990- Various fixes to pimp.
1991
1992- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1993
1994- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1995 more problems than it solves.
1996
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001997
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001998What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1999=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002000
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002001*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2002
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002003Core and builtins
2004-----------------
2005
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002006- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2007 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2008
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002009- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2010 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002011 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002012
2013- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2014 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2015 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002016 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002017
2018- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2019 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002020
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002021- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2022 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2023 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2024
2025- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002026 770247.
2027
2028- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002029
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002030Extension modules
2031-----------------
2032
2033- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2034 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2035
2036- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2037
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002038- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2039
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002040- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2041 contained within the _strptime module.
2042
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002043- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2044 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2045
2046- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002047 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2048
2049- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2050 the find_class attribute, if present.
2051
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002052- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002053
2054 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2055 (SF bug 763298).
2056
2057 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002058 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2059 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2060 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002061
2062 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2063
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002064Library
2065-------
2066
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002067- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2068
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002069- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2070 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2071 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2072 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2073 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2074 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2075 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2076 or Tester().
2077
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002078- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2079 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2080 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2081 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2082 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2083 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2084 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2085 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2086 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002087
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002088 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002089
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002090- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2091 weren't before was an oversight.
2092
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002093- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2094 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2095
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002096- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2097 when there are no lines.
2098
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002099- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2100 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2101
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002102- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2103 to child processes.
2104
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002105- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2106
2107- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2108
2109- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2110 xmlrpclib.
2111
2112- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2113 responses.
2114
2115- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2116 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2117
2118- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2119 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2120 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2121
2122- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2123 used as patterns.
2124
2125- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2126 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2127 than Tk 8.3.
2128
2129- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2130
2131- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002132
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002133Tools/Demos
2134-----------
2135
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002136- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2137
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002138- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2139
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002140- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002141
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002142Build
2143-----
2144
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002145- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2146
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002147- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2148
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002149- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2150 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002151
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002152- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2153 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2154 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002155
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002156C API
2157-----
2158
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002159- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2160 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2161
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002162Windows
2163-------
2164
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002165- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2166 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2167 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2168 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2169 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2170 Python exception ::
2171
2172 thread.error: can't start new thread
2173
2174 is raised now.
2175
2176- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2177 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2178 instead of from DLL teardown.
2179
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002180Mac
2181---
2182
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002183- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002184 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002185 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2186 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2187 the executable in the bundle.
2188
2189- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002190
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002191- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2192
2193- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2194 on Panther.
2195
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002196What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2197================================
2198
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002199*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002200
2201Core and builtins
2202-----------------
2203
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002204- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2205 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2206 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2207 with the -i option.
2208
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002209- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2210 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2211
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002212- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2213 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2214
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002215- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2216 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2217 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2218 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2219 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2220 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2221 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2222 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2223 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2224 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2225 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2226 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2227 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002228
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002229- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2230 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2231 embedded in a lambda expression.
2232
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002233- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2234 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2235 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2236 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2237 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2238
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002239- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2240 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2241 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2242
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002243- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2244 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2245
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002246- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2247 It's writable again.
2248
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002249- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2250 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2251 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002252 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002253
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002254- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2255 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2256 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2257
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002258Extension modules
2259-----------------
2260
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002261- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2262 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2263
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002264- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2265 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2266 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2267 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2268
2269- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2270 collection.
2271
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002272- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2273 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2274 unique within a single program run.
2275
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002276- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2277 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2278
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002279- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2280 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2281
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002282- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2283 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002284
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002285- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2286
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002287- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2288 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2289
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002290- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2291 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2292 for many BSD-derived systems.
2293
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002294
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002295Library
2296-------
2297
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002298- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2299 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2300 primary ones:
2301
2302 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2303 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2304 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2305
2306 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2307 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2308 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2309 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2310 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2311 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2312
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002313- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2314 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2315 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2316 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2317 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2318 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2319 argument.
2320
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002321- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2322 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2323 in the archive.
2324
2325- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2326 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2327
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002328- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2329 569574).
2330
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002331- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2332 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2333 no more.
2334
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002335- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2336 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2337 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2338 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2339 code coverage.
2340
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002341- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2342 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2343 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002344 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2345 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002346
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002347- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2348 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2349 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002350 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002351
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002352- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2353
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002354- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2355 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2356 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2357 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2358
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002359- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2360 handling.
2361
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002362- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2363 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2364
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002365- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2366 in socket.py.
2367
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002368- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2369
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002370- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2371 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2372 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2373 opener with proxy support.
2374
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002375- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2376
2377- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2378
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002379Tools/Demos
2380-----------
2381
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002382- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2383
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002384- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2385
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002386- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2387 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002388
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002389- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2390 files.
2391
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002392Build
2393-----
2394
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002395- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002396 different root directory.
2397
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002398C API
2399-----
2400
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002401- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2402 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2403 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2404 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2405 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2406 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2407 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2408 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2409 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2410 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2411
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002412- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2413 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2414 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2415 from Python.
2416
2417
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002418New platforms
2419-------------
2420
2421None this time.
2422
2423Tests
2424-----
2425
2426- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2427 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2428
2429Windows
2430-------
2431
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002432- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2433
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002434- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2435 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2436 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2437 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2438 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2439 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2440 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2441 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2442 that's what it's for.
2443
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002444Mac
2445---
2446
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002447- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2448 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2449 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2450 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002451- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2452 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2453- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002454
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002455SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2456------------------------------------
2457
2458430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2459598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2460622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2461661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2462683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2463697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2464713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2465724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2466727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2467729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2468730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2469731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2470732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2471733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2472735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2473740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2474744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2475745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2476747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2477749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2478751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2479753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2480755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2481757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2482760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2483
2484
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002485What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2486================================
2487
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002488*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002489
2490Core and builtins
2491-----------------
2492
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002493- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2494 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2495
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002496- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2497 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2498 and cannot be strings).
2499
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002500- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2501 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2502 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2503 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2504
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002505- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2506 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2507 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2508 Python itself.
2509
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002510- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2511 the referenced object, if it has one.
2512
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002513- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2514 the thread started at
2515 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2516
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002517- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2518 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2519 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2520 placed on a list index.
2521
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002522- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2523 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2524 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2525 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2526
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002527- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2528 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2529 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2530 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2531 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2532 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2533 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2534
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002535- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2536 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2537 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2538 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2539 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2540
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002541- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2542 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002543
2544- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2545 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2546 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2547 #693195.)
2548
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002549- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2550 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002551
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002552- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002553 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002554 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2555 interpreter executions, would fail.
2556
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002557- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002558 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002559 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002560
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002561Extension modules
2562-----------------
2563
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002564- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2565 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2566 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2567 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2568
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002569- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2570 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2571
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002572- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2573 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2574 and Greg Chapman.)
2575
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002576- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2577 recursively.
2578
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002579- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002580 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2581 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2582 leaks.
2583
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002584- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2585
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002586- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2587 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2588 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2589 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2590 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2591 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2592 #705836.
2593
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002594- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002595 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2596
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002597- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2598 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2599 See SF bug #692416.
2600
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002601- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2602 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2603
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002604- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2605 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2606 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002607
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002608- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002609 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2610 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2611
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002612- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2613 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2614 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2615 timeouts to work properly.
2616
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002617Library
2618-------
2619
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002620- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2621 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2622 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2623 future release.
2624
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002625- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2626 for querying platform dependent features.
2627
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002628- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002629
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002630- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2631 pickle protocol versions.
2632
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002633- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2634 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2635 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2636
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002637- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2638
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002639- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2640 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2641 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2642 modules.
2643
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002644- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2645 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2646 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2647
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002648- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2649 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2650
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002651- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2652 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2653 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2654
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002655- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002656 MS Office extensions.
2657
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002658- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2659 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2660
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002661- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2662 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2663
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002664- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2665 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2666 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2667 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2668 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2669 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2670
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002671- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2672 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2673 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002674
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002675- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2676 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2677 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2678
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002679- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2680
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002681- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2682 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2683 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2684
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002685Tools/Demos
2686-----------
2687
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002688- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2689 See the module docstring for details.
2690
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002691Build
2692-----
2693
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002694- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2695 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002696
2697C API
2698-----
2699
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002700- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2701
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002702- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2703 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2704 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2705
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002706- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2707 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002708
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002709 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2710 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2711 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002712
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002713- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002714 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2715
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002716- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2717 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2718 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002719
2720New platforms
2721-------------
2722
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002723None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002724
2725Tests
2726-----
2727
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002728- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2729 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002730
2731Windows
2732-------
2733
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002734- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2735 function.
2736
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002737- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2738 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002739
2740Mac
2741---
2742
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002743- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2744 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002745
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002746- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2747 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002748
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002749- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2750 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2751 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002752
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002753- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002754 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2755 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002756
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002757- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2758 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002759
2760
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002761What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2762=================================
2763
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002764*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002765
2766Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002767-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002768
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002769- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2770 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2771 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2772
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002773- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2774 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2775 (SF patch #664376.)
2776
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002777- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2778 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2779 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2780 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2781 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2782 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002783 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002784
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002785- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2786 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2787 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2788 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002789 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002790
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002791- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2792 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2793 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2794 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2795 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2796 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2797 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2798 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2799 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2800 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2801 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2802
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002803- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2804 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2805 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2806 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2807 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2808 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2809
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002810- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2811 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2812
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002813- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2814 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2815 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2816 case.)
2817
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002818- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2819 passed as unicode strings.
2820
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002821- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2822 See SF bug #683467.
2823
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002824- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2825 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2826
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002827- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2828
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002829- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2830
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002831- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2832 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2833 arguments.
2834
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002835- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2836 See SF bug #667147.
2837
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002838- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002839 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002840 See SF bug #676155.
2841
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002842- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002843 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002844 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2845 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2846 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2847 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2848 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2849 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002850
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002851Extension modules
2852-----------------
2853
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002854- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2855 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2856 tp_as_number pointer.
2857
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002858- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2859 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2860 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2861 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2862 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2863
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002864- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2865
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002866- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2867
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002868- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002869 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002870 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2871 patch #678531.)
2872
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002873- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2874 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2875
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002876- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2877 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2878
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002879- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2880
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002881- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2882 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2883 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2884
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002885- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2886
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002887- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2888 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2889
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002890- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002891
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002892- datetime changes:
2893
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002894 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2895
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002896 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2897 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2898 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2899 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2900 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2901 now.
2902
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002903 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002904 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2905 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002906
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002907 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002908 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002909 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2910 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2911 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2912 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002913
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002914 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2915 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2916 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002917 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2918
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002919 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2920 by a later example coded by Guido.
2921
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002922 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002923 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2924 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2925 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002926 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2927 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2928
2929 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2930 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2931 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2932 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2933 tzinfo subclass instance.
2934
2935 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2936 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2937 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2938 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2939 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2940 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2941 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2942 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002943
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002944 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2945 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2946 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2947 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2948 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002949 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2950
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002951 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002952
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002953 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2954 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2955 as a naive datetime object.
2956
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002957 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2958 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2959 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2960
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002961 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2962 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2963 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2964 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2965 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2966 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2967 comparison.
2968
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002969 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2970 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2971 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2972 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002973 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002974
2975 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002976
2977 and ::
2978
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002979 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2980
2981 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2982 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2983 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2984 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2985
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002986 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2987 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2988 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2989 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2990 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2991
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002992 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2993 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002994 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2995 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002996
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002997Library
2998-------
2999
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003000- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3001 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3002
3003- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3004 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3005 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3006 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3007 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3008 See PEP 307 for details.
3009
3010- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3011 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3012
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003013- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3014 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003015 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003016 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3017 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003018 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003019
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003020- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3021 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3022
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003023- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3024 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3025 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3026
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003027- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3028
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003029- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3030 exception.
3031
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003032- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3033 class.
3034
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003035- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3036 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3037 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3038
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003039- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3040 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3041
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003042- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003043 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3044 See SF bug #659228.
3045
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003046- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3047 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3048 See SF patch #651082.
3049
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003050- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003051
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003052- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3053 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3054
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003055- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003056 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003057
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003058- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3059 DOS paths from other platforms.
3060
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003061Tools/Demos
3062-----------
3063
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003064- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3065 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3066 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3067 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3068 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3069 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3070 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3071 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3072 example:
3073
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003074 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3075 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003076
3077 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3078
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003079
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003080Build
3081-----
3082
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003083- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3084 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3085 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003086 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3087
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003088 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3089
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003090- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3091 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3092 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3093 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3094 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3095 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3096 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3097 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3098 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3099
3100- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3101 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3102 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3103 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3104
3105- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3106 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3107
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003108C API
3109-----
3110
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003111- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3112 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003113
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003114- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3115 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3116 tp_as_number pointer.
3117
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003118- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3119 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3120 (SF #681367)
3121
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003122- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3123 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3124 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3125 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003126
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003127Tests
3128-----
3129
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003130- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003131 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3132 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3133 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3134 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3135 pydoc.)
3136
3137- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3138
3139- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003140
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003141Windows
3142-------
3143
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003144- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3145 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3146 time).
3147
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003148- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3149 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3150
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003151- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3152 release without strong cryptography.
3153
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003154- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003155 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003156
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003157- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3158 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3159
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003160Mac
3161---
3162
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003163- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3164 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003165
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003166- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3167 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3168 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003169
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003170- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3171 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003172
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003173- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3174 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3175 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3176 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003177
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003178- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003179 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3180 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3181 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003183
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003184What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003185=================================
3186
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003187*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003189Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003191
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003192- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3193
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003194- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3195 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003196 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003197 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003198 a different meaning than before.
3199
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003200- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003201 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003202 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003203
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003204- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003205 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003206 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003207
3208- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3209 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3210 and deallocation.
3211
3212- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3213 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3214
3215- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3216 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3217 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3218 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3219 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3220
3221- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3222 now detected by the garbage collector.
3223
3224- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3225 [SF bug 519621]
3226
3227- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3228 identifier.
3229
3230- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3231 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3232 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3233 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3234 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3235 [SF bug 563060]
3236
3237- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3238 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3239 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3240 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3241 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3242
3243- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3244 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3245 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3246
3247- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3248
3249- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3250 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3251 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3252 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3253 state of the slots would be lost.)
3254
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003255Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003256-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003257
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003258- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003259 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3260 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3261 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3262 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003263 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3264 Jython 2.1.
3265
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003266- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003267 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003268 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3269 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3270 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3271 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3272 these, see PEP 302.
3273
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003274- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3275 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3276 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3277
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003278- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3279 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3280 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3281
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003282- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3283 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3284 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3285
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003286- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3287 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3288 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3289 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3290 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3291 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3292 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3293 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3294 releases or implementations.
3295
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003296- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003297 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3298 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003299
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003300- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3301 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3302
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003303- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3304 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3305 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3306
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003307- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3308 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3309
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003310- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3311 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003312 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3313 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003314
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003315- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3316 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3317 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3318 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3319 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3320
3321 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3322 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3323 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3324 pattern.
3325
3326 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3327 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3328 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3329 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3330
3331 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3332 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3333 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3334 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3335 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3336 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3337
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003338- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3339 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3340 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3341 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3342 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3343 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3344 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3345 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003346
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003347- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3348 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3349 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3350 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3351 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003352 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3353 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3354 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3355 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3356 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3357 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3358 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003359
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003360- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3361 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3362
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003363- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3364 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3365 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3366 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3367 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3368 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3369 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3370 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3371 to Zack Weinberg!
3372
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003373- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3374 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3375 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3376 type. This has been fixed now.
3377
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003378- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3379 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3380 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3381
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003382- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3383 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3384 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3385 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3386 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3387 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3388 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3389 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003390 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003391
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003392- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3393 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3394 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003395
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003396- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3397 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3398 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3399 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3400 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3401 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3402 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3403 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003404 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003405 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3406 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3407
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003408- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3409 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3410 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3411 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3412 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3413 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3414 this.)
3415
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003416- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3417 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003418 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003419 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003420 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3421 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003422 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3423 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003424
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003425- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3426 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3427 currently running.
3428
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003429- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3430 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3431 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3432 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3433
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003434- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3435 as directory names.
3436
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003437- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3438 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3439
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003440- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3441 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3442
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003443- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003444 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3445 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003446
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003447- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3448 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3449 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3450 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3451 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3452
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003453- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3454 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3455 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3456 removed.
3457
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003458- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3459 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3460 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3461
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003462- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3463 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3464 to __debug__.
3465
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003466- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3467 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3468 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3469
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003470- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3471 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3472 deprecated now.
3473
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003474- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3475 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3476 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003477
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003478- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3479 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3480 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3481 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3482 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003483
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003484- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3485 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3486
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003487- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3488 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3489 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003490 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003491 is backward compatible.
3492
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003493- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3494 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3495 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3496 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3497 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3498
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003499- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3500 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3501 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3502 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3503 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3504 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003505
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003506- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3507 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3508
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003509- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3510 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3511
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003512- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3513 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3514 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3515 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3516 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3517
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003518- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3519 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3520 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3521
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003522- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003523 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3524
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003525- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3526 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3527 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003528
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003529- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3530 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3531
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003532- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3533 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3534 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3535
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003536- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3537
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003538Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003540
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003541- Added three operators to the operator module:
3542 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3543 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3544 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3545
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003546- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3547
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003548- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3549 archives.
3550
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003551- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3552 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3553 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3554
3555 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3556
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003557- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3558 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3559 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003560 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003561
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003562- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3563 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3564 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3565 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003566 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3567 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3568 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3569 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003570
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003571- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3572 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003573
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003574- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3575
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003576- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3577 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3578
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003579- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3580 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3581 supported.
3582
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003583- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3584
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003585- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3586 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003587
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003588- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3589 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3590
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003591- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3592
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003593- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3594 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3595
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003596- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3597 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3598 functions but callable type objects.
3599
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003600- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003601 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003602 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003603
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003604- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3605 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003606
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003607- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3608 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003609
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003610- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3611 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3612 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3613 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3614
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003615- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3616 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003617
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003618- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3619 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3620 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3621 and __imul__.
3622
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003623- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003624 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3625 is called.
3626
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003627- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3628 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3629 interpreter was compiled.
3630
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003631- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3632 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3633 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003634 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003635 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3636 1, not 2.
3637
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003638- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3639 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3640 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3641 limit.
3642
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003643- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3644 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3645 bug #623464.
3646
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003647- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3648 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3649 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3650 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3651
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003652Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003654
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003655- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3656
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003657- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3658 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3659 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3660 with Python 2.3a2.
3661
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003662- os.path exposes getctime.
3663
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003664- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003665 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003666 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003667 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003668 unit tests of floating point results.
3669
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003670- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3671 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3672 has been increased.
3673
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003674- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3675 executed.
3676
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003677- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3678 postinstallation script.
3679
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003680- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3681 test the current module.
3682
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003683- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003684 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3685 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3686 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3687 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3688
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003689- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003690 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003691 Ward's Optik package.
3692
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003693- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3694 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3695 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3696 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3697
3698- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3699 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003700 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003701
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003702- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3703 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3704 shelf are binary pickles.
3705
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003706- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3707 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3708
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003709- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3710 modules are iterators now.
3711
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003712- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3713 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3714 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3715 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3716 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3717 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003718
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003719- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3720 with their entity value.
3721
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003722- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3723
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003724- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3725 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003726
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003727- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3728 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003729 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003730
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003731- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3732 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3733 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3734 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3735 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3736 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3737 main():
3738
3739 import locale
3740 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3741
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003742- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3743 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3744
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003745- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3746 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3747 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3748 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3749 to the new standard.
3750
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003751- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3752 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3753 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3754 an extension to the database.
3755
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003756- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3757 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3758 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3759 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003760 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003761
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003762- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003763 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003764
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003765- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3766 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3767 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3768 bounded integers.
3769
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003770- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3771 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3772 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3773 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3774 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3775 in existence.
3776
3777 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3778 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3779 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3780 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3781 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3782 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3783
3784 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3785 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3786 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3787 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3788
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003789- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3790 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3791 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3792
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003793- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3794
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003795- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3796 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3797 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3798 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3799
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003800- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3801 argument.
3802
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003803- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3804 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3805 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3806 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3807 [SF patch 560794].
3808
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003809- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3810 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3811 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003812 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3813 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3814 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003815
3816- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3817 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003818
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003819- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3820 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3821 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3822 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003823
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003824- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3825 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3826 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3827 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3828 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3829
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003830- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003831
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003832- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3833
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003834- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3835 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3836 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3837 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3838 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3839 identical to None.
3840
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003841- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3842 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3843 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3844 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3845 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3846 results now.
3847
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003848- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3849 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3850
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003851- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3852 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3853 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3854 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3855 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3856 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3857 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3858 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3859
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003860- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3861
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003862- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3863 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3864
3865- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3866 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3867 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3868 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3869 and other systems.
3870
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003871- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3872 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3873 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3874 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 +00003875 work well with these.
3876
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003877- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3878
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003879- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003880 connections.
3881
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003882- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3883 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3884 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3885
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003886- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3887 sets
3888
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003889- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3890 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3891 name.
3892
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003893- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3894 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3895 passed in.
3896
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003897- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003898 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003899 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3900 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003901
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003902- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3903
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003904- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3905
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003906- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3907 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3908 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3909
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003910- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3911 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3912 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3913 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003914 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003915
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003916- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003917 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003918 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003919
3920- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3921 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3922 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3923
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003924- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003925 the value of its expression argument.
3926
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003927- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3928 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3929 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3930
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003931- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3932 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3933 skipstone browser was included.
3934
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003935- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3936 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003938Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003940
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003941- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3942 names in addition to accepting file names.
3943
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003944- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3945 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3946 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3947 still used and useful.)
3948
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003949- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3950 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3951 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3952 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003953
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003954- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3955 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3956 the generated binary.
3957
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003958Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003960
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003961- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3962
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003963- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3964 except in the hands of experts.
3965
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003966- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003967 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3968 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3969 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003970
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003971- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3972 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3973 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3974 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3975 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3976 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3977 builds.
3978
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003979- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3980 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3981 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3982 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3983 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3984 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3985 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3986 new type.
3987
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003988- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003989
3990 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3991 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3992 positive infinities.
3993
3994 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3995 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3996 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3997 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3998 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3999 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4000 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4001
4002 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4003
4004 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4005
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004006- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4007 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4008 size of the executable.
4009
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004010- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4011 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4012 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4013 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004014
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004015- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4016
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004017- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4018 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4019 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004020
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004021- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4022 well as Unix.
4023
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004024- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4025 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4026 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4027 modules in the README file for details.
4028
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004029C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004031
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004032- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4033 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004034 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004035 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004036 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004037
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004038- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4039 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4040 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4041 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4042 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4043 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004044 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004045 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4046 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4047 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4048 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4049 aligned.)
4050
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004051- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4052 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4053 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4054
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004055- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4056 level.
4057
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004058- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4059 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4060 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4061 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4062 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4063
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004064- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4065 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4066 code.
4067
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004068- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4069 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4070 adjusting for negative indices.
4071
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004072- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4073 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4074 object.
4075
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004076- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4077 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4078 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4079
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004080- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4081 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004082
4083- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4084
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004085- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4086 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4087 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4088 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4089
4090- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4091
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004092- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004093
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004094- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004095 without going through the buffer API.
4096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004098
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004099- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4100 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4101 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4102 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4103
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004104- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4105 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4106
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004107- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004108 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4109
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004110New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004112
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004113- OpenVMS is now supported.
4114
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004115- AtheOS is now supported.
4116
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004117- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4118
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004119- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4120
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004121Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----
4123
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004124- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4125 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4126 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004127
4128Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004130
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004131- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4132 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4133 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4134 bugs.
4135 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004136 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004137 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4138 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004139 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004140
4141- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004142 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004143
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004144- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4145 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4146
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004147- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4148 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004149 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004150 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4151
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004152- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4153 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4154 use files" uninstall option).
4155
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004156- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4157
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004158- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4159 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4160
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004161- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4162 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4163 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4164
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004165- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4166 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4167 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4168 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4169 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004170 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4171 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4172 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004173
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004174- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004175 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004176 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4177 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4178 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4179 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4180 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4181 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4182 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4183 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4184 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4185 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4186 work around.
4187
4188- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4189 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4190 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4191 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4192 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4193 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4194 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4195 specified with O_CREAT too).
4196
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004197Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004198----
4199
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004200- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004201
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004202- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4203 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4204 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4205
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004206- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4207 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4208 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4209
4210- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4211 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4212 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4213 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4214 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4215 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4216 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4217 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004218
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004219- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4220 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4221 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004222
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004223- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4224 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4225 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4226 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4227 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004228
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004229- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4230 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4231 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004232
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004233- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4234 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004235
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004236- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4237 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4238 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4239 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4240 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004241
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004242- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4243 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4244 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4245
4246- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4247 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4248 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004249
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004250- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4251 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4252 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4253 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004254 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004256- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4257 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004258
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004259- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4260 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004261
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004262- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004263 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004264 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4265 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004266
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004267
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004268What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004269===============================
4270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4272
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004273Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004275
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004276- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4277 with a custom metaclass.
4278
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004279Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004281
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004282- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4283 are proxies.
4284
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004285Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004287
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004288- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4289 very short strings.
4290
4291- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4292 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4293 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4294 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4295 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4296
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004297Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004299
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004300- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4301 close or delete time).
4302
4303- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4304 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4305
4306- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4307
4308- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004309 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004310
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004311Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004313
4314Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004316
4317C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004319
4320New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322
4323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004325
4326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004328
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004329- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4330
4331- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4332 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4333
4334- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4335 deleted at process exit time.
4336
4337- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4338 in backslash.
4339
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004340Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004342
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004343- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4344 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4345 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4346
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004347
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004348What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004349===========================
4350
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4352
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004353Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004355
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004356- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4357 been extensively updated. See
4358
4359 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4360
4361 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4362
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004363- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4364 deleted!
4365
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004366- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4367 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4368 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4369 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4370 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4371
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004372- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4373
4374 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4375 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4376
4377 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4378 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4379 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4380 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4381 supported anyway.
4382
4383 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4384 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4385
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004386- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4387 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4388 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4389 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4390 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004391
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004392- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4393 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4394 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4395
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004396Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004398
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004399- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4400 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4401 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4402 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4403 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4404 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004405 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4406 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4407 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4408 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004409
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004410- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4411 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4412 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4413
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004414Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004416
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004417- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4418
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004419Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004421
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004422- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4423 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4424 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4425 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4426 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4427 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4428
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004429- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4430
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004431- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4432
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004433- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4434
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004435- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4436 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4437 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4438
4439- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4440
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004441Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004443
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004444- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4445 off a search on Google.
4446
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004447Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004449
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004450- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4451 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4452 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4453 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4454 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4455 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4456 other platforms should do likewise.
4457
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004458- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4459 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4460 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4461
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004462C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004464
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004465- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4466 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4467 producing key-value pairs.
4468
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004469- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004470 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004471 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4472 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4473 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4474 previously went unchallenged.
4475
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004476New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004478
4479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004481
4482Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484
4485Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004487
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004488- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4489 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004490
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004491- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4492 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4493 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4494 home.
4495
4496
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004497What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498===========================
4499
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4501
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004502Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004504
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004505- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4506 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004507
4508 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004509 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004510
4511 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4512 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004513 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004514 This needs to be documented.
4515
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004516- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4517 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4518
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004519- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4520 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4521 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4522
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004523- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4524 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4525
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004526- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4527 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4528 class forbids it).
4529
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004530- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4531 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4532 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4533
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004534- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4535
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004536Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004538
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004539- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4540 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004541 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004542
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004543- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4544 (like 1 + '').
4545
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004546Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004548
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004549- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4550 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4551 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4552 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004553 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004554 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4555
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004556- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4557 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4558 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4559 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4560
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004561- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4562 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004563 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4564 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4565 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004566
4567- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4568 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004569
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004570- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4571 bytes on its input.
4572
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004573Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004575
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004576- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004577 convenience function.
4578
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004579- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4580 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4581 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004582 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4583 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4584 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4585 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4586 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4587 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004588
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004589- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4590 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4591 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4592 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4593
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004594- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4595 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4596 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4597
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004598- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4599 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4600 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4601 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4602
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004603- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4604 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004606 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4607 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4608 new -l and -e options.
4609
4610- statcache is now deprecated.
4611
4612- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4613 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004615 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4616 time properly taken into account.
4617
4618- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4619 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4620 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4621 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4622
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004623Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004625
4626Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004628
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004629- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4630 is built with libdb3 if available.
4631
4632- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4633
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004636
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004637- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4638 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4639 PySequence_Size().
4640
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004641- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4642
4643- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4644 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4645 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4646
4647- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4648 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4649
4650- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4651 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4652
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004653New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004656- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4657 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4658
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004659- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4660 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4661
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004662- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4663
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004664Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004666
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004667- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4668 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4669
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004670Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004672
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004673Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004675
4676- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4677 removed completely in the next release.
4678
4679- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4680 OSX.
4681
4682- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4683 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4684
4685- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4686
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004687
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004688What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004689===========================
4690
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4692
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004693Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004695
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004696- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004697 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004698 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004699 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4700 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004701 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4702 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004703 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4704 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004705
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004706- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4707 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4708
4709- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4710 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4711
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004712Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004714
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004715- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4716 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4717 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4718 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4719 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4720 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4721 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4722 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4723
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004724- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4725 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4726 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4727 example).
4728
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004729- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004730 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004731 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004732 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004733
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004734- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4735 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4736 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004737 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004738
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004739- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4740 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4741 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4742 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4743 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4744 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4745
4746 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4747
4748 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4749
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004750Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004752
4753- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4754
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004755- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4756
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004757- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4758 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004759
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004760- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4761 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4762 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4763 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4764 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4765 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004766 attributes.
4767
4768- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4769 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4770 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004771
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004772- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4773 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4774 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004775
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004776- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4777 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4778 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004779 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4780 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4781
4782- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4783 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004784
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004785Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004787
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004788- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4789 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4790
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004791- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4792 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4793 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4794 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4795
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004796- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4797 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4798 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4799 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4800
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004801 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4802 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4803 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4804 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4805 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4806 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4807 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4808 without losing information).
4809
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004810- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004811 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4812 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4813 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4814 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4815 module).
4816
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004817 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004818 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4819 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4820 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4821 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004822
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004823- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004824 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4825 encoding.
4826
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004827- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4828 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4829
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004831 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4832
4833- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4834 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4835 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4836 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4837
4838- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4839
4840- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4841 ON, and OFF.
4842
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004843- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4844 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4845
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004846Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004848
4849- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4850 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4851 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004852
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004853- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4854 been added: -X and -E.
4855
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004856Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004858
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004859- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4860 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4861
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004862C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004864
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004865- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4866 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4867 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4868 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4869 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4870
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004871- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4872 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4873 as long) arguments.
4874
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004875- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4876 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4877 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4878 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4879 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4880 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4881
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004882- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4883 input.
4884
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004885New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004887
4888Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004890
4891Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004893
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004894- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4895 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4896 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4897
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004898- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4899 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4900 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004901 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004902
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4904 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4905 import signal
4906 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004907
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004909 while 1:
4910 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004912 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4913 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4914 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4915 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004916
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004917
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004918What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4919===========================
4920
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4922
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004923Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004925
4926- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4927 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4928 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4929
4930- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4931 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4932 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4933 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4934 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4935 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4936 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004937
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004938- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004939 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004940 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4941 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4942 associate a docstring with a property.
4943
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004944- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4945 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4946 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4947 other built-in object types.
4948
4949- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4950 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4951 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4952 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4953 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4954
4955- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4956 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4957
4958- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4959 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004960 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004961 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4962 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4963 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4964 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4965 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4966
4967- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4968 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4969 class.
4970
4971- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4972 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4973 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4974 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4975
4976- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4977 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4978 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4979 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4980
4981- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4982 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4983
4984- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4985 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4986 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4987 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4988 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004989 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004990 with the same value as s.
4991
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004992- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4993
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004994Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004996
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004997- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4998
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004999- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5000 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5001 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5002 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5003 objects.
5004
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005005- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5006 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005007 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5008 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5009
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005010- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5011 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5012 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5013
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005014Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005015-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005016
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005017- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5018 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5019 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5020 by the instances.
5021
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005022- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5023 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5024 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5025
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005026- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5027 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5028 before the entire comparison is complete.
5029
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005030- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5031 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5032 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5033
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005034- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5035 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5036 getwriter().
5037
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005038- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5039 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5040
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005041- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005042 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5043 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5044
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005045- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5046 iterable object.
5047
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005048- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5049 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005050
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005051- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5052 authentication.
5053
5054- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5055 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005056
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005057- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005058 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5059 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5060 a sample driver.)
5061
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005062Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005064
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005065- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5066 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5067 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5068 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5069 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5070 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5071 kernel has large file support.
5072
5073- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5074 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5075 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5076 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5077 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5078
5079- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5080 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5081 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5082
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005083C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005085
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005086- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5087 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5088
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005089New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005091
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005092- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5093 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5094
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005095Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005097
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005098- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5099 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5100 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5101 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5102 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5103
5104- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5105 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5106 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5107 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5108
5109- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5110 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5111
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005112Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005114
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005115- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005116 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5117 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005118
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005119
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005120What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5121===========================
5122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5124
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005125Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005127
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005128- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5129 big to represent as a C double.
5130
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005131- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5132 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5133 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5134 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5135 restriction).
5136
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005137- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5138 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5139 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5140 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5141 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5142
5143 >>> dir([])
5144 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5145 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5146 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5147 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5148 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5149 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5150 'reverse', 'sort']
5151
5152 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5153
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005154- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005155 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5156 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5157 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5158 OverflowError exception.
5159
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005160- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005161 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005162 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5163 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5164 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5165 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5166 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005167 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5169 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5170
5171 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5172 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5173 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5174 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005175
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005176- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005177 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5178 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5179 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5180 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5181 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5182 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5183 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5184 once it is created.
5185
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005186- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5187 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5188 (key, value) pairs.
5189
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005190- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005191 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5192 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5193
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005194- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5195 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5196 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5197 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5198 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005199
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005200- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005201 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5202 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5203
5204 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5205
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005206- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005207 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5208
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005209Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005211
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005212- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005213 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5214 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005215
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005216- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5217 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5218 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5219 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5220 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5221 in this area anymore).
5222
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005223- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5224 threading.Timer.
5225
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005226- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5227 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5228
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005229- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005230 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5231
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005232- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005233 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5234 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5235 converted to Python longs.
5236
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005237- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005238 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5239
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005240- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5241 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5242 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5243
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005244Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005246
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005247- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5248 division operators as per PEP 238.
5249
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005250Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005252
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005253- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5254 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5255 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5256 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5257
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005258C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005260
5261- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005262
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005263- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5264 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005265 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5268 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005269 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005271
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005272- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005273 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5274 module:
5275
5276 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005277
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005278 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5279 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005280
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005281 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5282 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005283
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005284 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5285
5286 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5287
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005288- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005289 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5290 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5291 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005292
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005293New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005295
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005296- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5297 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5298 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5299 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5300 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005301
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005302Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005304
5305Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005307
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005308- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5309 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5310 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5311 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005312 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5313 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5314 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5315 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5316 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005317
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005318- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005319 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5320
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005321
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005322What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5323===========================
5324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5326
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005327Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005329
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005330- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5331 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5332
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005333- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5334 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5335 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005336
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005337- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5338 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5339 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5340 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005341
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005342- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5343
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005345
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005346Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005348
5349- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005350 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005351 the module docstring for details.
5352
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005353Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005355
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005356- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005357 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5358 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5359 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005360
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005361- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5362 Nick Mathewson.
5363
5364Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005366
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005367- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5368 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5369 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5370 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5371 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5372 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5373 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5374 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5375
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005376- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5377 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5378 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5379 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5380
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005381- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5382 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5383 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5384 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5385 come a long way).
5386
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005387- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5388 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5389 write filters for these warnings).
5390
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005391- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5392 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5393 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5394 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5395 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5396
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005397- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5398 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5399 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5400 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5401 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5402 older distribution.
5403
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005404Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005405-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005406
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005407- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5408 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005409 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005410
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005411- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5412 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5413 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5414
5415- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5416
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005417- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5418
5419- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5420
5421- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005424
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005425- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5426
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005427New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005429
5430C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005432
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005433- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5434 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5435 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5436 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5437 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5438 against buffer overruns.
5439
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005440- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005441 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5442 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005443 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5444 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5445 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5446
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005447- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5448 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5449 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5450 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5451 deprecated.
5452
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005453Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005455
5456- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5457 relevant is found.
5458
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005459
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005460What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005461===========================
5462
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5464
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005465Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005466----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005467
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005468- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5469 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5470 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5471 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5472 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5473 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5474 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5475 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005476 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005477 repaired.
5478
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005479- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005480 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005481 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5482 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5483 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5484 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5485 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5486 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5487 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5488 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5489
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005490- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5491 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5492 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5493 leading BMO character).
5494
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005495- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5496 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5497 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5498
5499 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5500 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5501 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005502
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005503 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5504 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5505 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5506 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5507 for various simple to use conversions.
5508
5509 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5510 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5511
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5513 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5514 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5515 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5516 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5517 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5518 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5519 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5520 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5521 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5522 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5523 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5524 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5525 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5526 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005527
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005528- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5529 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5530 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005531 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005532 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005533
5534 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005535 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5536 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5537 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5538 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5539 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005540 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5541 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005542
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005543 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5544 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5545 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005546 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005547
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005548- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5549 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5550 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5551 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5552 floating arithmetic,
5553
5554 x = 9007199254740992.0
5555 print long(x)
5556
5557 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5558 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5559 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5560 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5561 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5562 functions are of good quality).
5563
5564 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5565 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5566 algorithms to break.
5567
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005568- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5569 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5570 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5571 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5572 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5573 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5574 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5575 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5576 order.
5577
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005578- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5579 operation along the most common code paths.
5580
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005581- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5582 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5583
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005584- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5585 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5586 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5587 {}.update(UserDict())
5588
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005589- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5590 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5591 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5592 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5593 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5594 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5595 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5596 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5597
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005598- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005599 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005601 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005602 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5603 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005604 join() method of strings
5605 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005606 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5607 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005609 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005610
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005611- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5612 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5613
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005614- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5615 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5616
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005617- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5618 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5619 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5620 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5621
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005622- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5623 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005624 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005625 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5626 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005627
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005628- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5629
5630
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005631Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005633
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005634- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005635 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005636 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5637 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5638
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005639- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5640 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5641
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005642- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5643 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5644 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5645 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5646
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005647- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5648 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5649 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5650
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005651- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5652
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005653- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5654
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005655- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5656 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5657 that are still imported into string.py).
5658
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005659- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5660
5661- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5662 Now it does.
5663
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005664- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5665
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005666- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5667 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5668 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5669 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5670 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005671 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5672 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005673
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005674- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5675 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5676 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5677 'help(object)'.
5678
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005679Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005680-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005681
5682- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005683 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005684 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5685 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5686
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005687- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005688 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5689 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005690
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005691C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005692-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005693
5694- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5695 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696
5697----
5698
5699**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**