blob: 23f760b774bd437fbc6e9f9a4e81a7bf9ac96487 [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
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000015- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
16 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
17 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
18 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
19
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000020- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
21 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
22 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
23 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
24 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
25
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000026- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
27 disabled caused a crash.
28
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000029- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
30 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
31
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000032- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
33 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
34
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000035- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
36
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000037- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000038 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
39 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
40 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000041
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000042- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
43
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000044- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
45 returning None.
46
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000047- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
48 ('\') with a specific error message.
49
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000050- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
51
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000052- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
53 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
54
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000055- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000056 an ferror() call.
57
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000058- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
59 list.sort().
60
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000061- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
62 (2+3) --> (5).
63
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000064- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
65
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000066- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
67 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000068
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000069- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
70 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
71 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
72
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000073Extension Modules
74-----------------
75
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000076- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
77 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
78
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000079- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
80
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000081- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
82 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
83 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
84
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000085- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
86
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000087- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
88 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
89
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000090- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
91 file size.
92
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000093- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
94
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000095- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
96 {remove_history,replace_history}
97
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000098- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
99 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000100
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000101- stat_float_times is now True.
102
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000103- array.array objects are now picklable.
104
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000105- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
106 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
107
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000108- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
109 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
110 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
111
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000112- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
113 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000114
115Library
116-------
117
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000118- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
119 files to PyPI.
120
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000121- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
122 them to PyPI.
123
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000124- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
125 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
126 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
127 work as expected.
128
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000129- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
130 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
131
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000132- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
133 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
134
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000135- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
136
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000137- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
138 to build.
139
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000140- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
141 symbolic links on Windows.
142
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000143- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
144 profile.py if available.
145
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000146- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
147
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000148- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
149 in LWPCookieJar.
150
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000151- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
152
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000153- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
154
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000155- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
156
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000157- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
158
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000159- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
160
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000161- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
162
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000163- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
164
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000165- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
166
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000167- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
168 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
169 be exploited in various ways.
170
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000171- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
172
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000173- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
174
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000175- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
176
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000177- Enhancements to the csv module:
178
179 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
180 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
181 PEP 305.
182 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
183 reporting.
184 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
185 dictates.
186 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000187 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000188 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000189 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
190 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000191 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
192 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000193 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000194 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
195 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
196 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
197 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
198 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
199 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
200 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
201 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
202 without first creating a dialect class.
203 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
204 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
205 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000206 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000207 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
208 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000209 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
210 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
211 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
212 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000213 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
214 This has been fixed.
215
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000216- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
217 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
218 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
219 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
220
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000221- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
222
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000223- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
224 (Bug #951915).
225
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000226- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
227 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
228 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
229 encoding alias table
230
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000231- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
232
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000233- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
234 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
235
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000236- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
237
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000238- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
239
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000240- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
241
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000242- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
243
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000244- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
245
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000246- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
247 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
248 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
249
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000250- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000251 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000252
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000253- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
254 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
255 tokenizer with very long source lines.
256
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000257- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
258 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
259
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000260- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
261 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000262
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000263- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
264 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
265
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000266- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
267 correctly.
268
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000269- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
270 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
271 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
272 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
273 between two lines.
274
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000275
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000276Build
277-----
278
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000279- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
280 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
281 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
282
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000283- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
284
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000285- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
286 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
287
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000288- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
289 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
290 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
291 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
292 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
293 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
294 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
295 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
296
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000297- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
298 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
299 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
300 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
301
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000302
303C API
304-----
305
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000306- Removed PyRange_New().
307
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000308
309Tests
310-----
311
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000312- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000313
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000314
315Documentation
316-------------
317
318- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
319 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
320 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
321
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000322Mac
323---
324
325
326
327Tools/Demos
328-----------
329
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000330- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000331
332
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000333What's New in Python 2.4 final?
334===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000335
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000336*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000337
338Core and builtins
339-----------------
340
341- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
342 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
343 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
344
345
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000346What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
347==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000348
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000349*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000350
351Core and builtins
352-----------------
353
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000354- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
355 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
356 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
357
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000358
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000359Library
360-------
361
362- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
363 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
364 raised is re-raised.
365
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000366- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
367 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
368
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000369- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
370 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
371 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
372 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
373 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
374 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
375 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
376 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
377 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
378 by the slice are recomputed now.
379
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000380- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000381
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000382Build
383-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000384
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000385- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
386 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
387 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000388
389C API
390-----
391
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000392- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
393
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000394
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000395What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
396================================
397
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000398*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000399
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000400License
401-------
402
403The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
404is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
405changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
406Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
407intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
408durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
409the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
410License::
411
412 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
413
414says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
415to Python 2.1.1.
416
417The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
418License Version 2.
419
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000420Core and builtins
421-----------------
422
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000423- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
424 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
425 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
426 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
427 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
428 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
429 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
430 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
431 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
432 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
433
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000434- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000435
436Extension Modules
437-----------------
438
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000439- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
440 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
441 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
442 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000443
444Library
445-------
446
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000447- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
448 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
449 returned.
450
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000451- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
452
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000453- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
454 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
455
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000456- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
457
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000458- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
459 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000460
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000461- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
462
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000463- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
464
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000465- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000466 the source code is updated and reloaded.
467
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000468Build
469-----
470
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000471- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000472
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000473What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
474================================
475
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000476*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000477
478Core and builtins
479-----------------
480
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000481- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000482 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
483
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000484- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
485 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
486 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
487 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
488
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000489- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
490 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
491
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000492- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
493 constant.
494
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000495- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
496 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
497 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
498 large), and to anomalies such as
499 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
500 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
501 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
502 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000503
504Extension modules
505-----------------
506
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000507- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
508 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000509 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
510 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
511 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000512
513Library
514-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000515
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000516- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000517 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000518 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
519 --swig-cpp.
520
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000521- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
522 it is set.
523
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000524- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000525
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000526- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
527 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
528 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
529 Closes bug #1039270.
530
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000531- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000532
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000533 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000534 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
535 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
536 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
537 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
538 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
539 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
540 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
541 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
542 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
543 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
544 + Updates to documentation.
545
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000546- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
547 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
548 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
549 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
550
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000551- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000552
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000553- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
554 applications should use the getmember function.
555
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000556- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
557
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000558- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
559 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
560 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
561 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
562 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
563 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
564 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
565 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
566 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
567
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000568- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
569 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000570 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000571
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000572- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
573 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
574 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
575 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
576 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
577 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
578 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
579 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000580
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000581- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
582 the new public features (of which there are many).
583
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000584- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000585 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
586 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
587 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
588 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000589 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000590
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000591- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
592
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000593- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
594 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
595 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
596 options.
597
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000598- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
599 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
600 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
601 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
602 conditions under which non-string values work.
603
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000604Build
605-----
606
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000607- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
608 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
609 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
610
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000611- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
612 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
613 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
614 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
615 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000616
617C API
618-----
619
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000620- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
621 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
622
623- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
624
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000625- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
626 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
627 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
628 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
629 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
630 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
631 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
632 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
633 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
634
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000635- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
636
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000637- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
638 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
639 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000640
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000641Tests
642-----
643
644- test__locale ported to unittest
645
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000646Mac
647---
648
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000649- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
650 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
651 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000652
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000653Tools/Demos
654-----------
655
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000656- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
657 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
658 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
659 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
660 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000661
662
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000663What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
664=================================
665
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000666*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000667
668Core and builtins
669-----------------
670
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000671- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000672 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
673
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000674- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
675 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
676 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
677 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
678 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
679 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
680 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
681 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000682 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
683 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
684 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
685 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
686 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000687
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000688- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
689 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
690 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
691 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
692 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
693
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000694- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
695
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000696- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
697 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
698
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000699- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
700 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
701 modified the list.
702
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000703- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
704 functions is now writable.
705
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000706- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
707 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
708 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
709 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
710
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000711- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
712 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
713 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
714 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
715 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000716
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000717- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
718 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
719
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000720Extension modules
721-----------------
722
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000723- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
724
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000725- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
726 data.
727
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000728- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
729 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
730 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
731 supposed to have been truncated away.
732
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000733- Added socket.socketpair().
734
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000735- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
736 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
737
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000738- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000739 versions of Python, have now been removed.
740
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000741Library
742-------
743
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000744- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000745 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000746
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000747- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
748 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
749
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000750- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
751 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
752
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000753- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
754
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000755- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
756 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000757
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000758- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
759 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
760
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000761- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
762
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000763- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
764
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000765- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
766
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000767- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
768 Percivall.
769
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000770- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
771 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
772
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000773- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
774 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
775 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000776 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000777
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000778- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
779 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
780 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
781 and exponent.
782
783- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
784
785- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
786 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
787 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
788
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000789- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
790 to the readline module.
791
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000792- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000793 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
794 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000795
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000796- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
797 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
798 contains symlinks.
799
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000800- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
801 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
802
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000803- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
804 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
805 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
806
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000807- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
808 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
809 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
810 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
811 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
812 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
813 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
814 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
815 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
816 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
817 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
818 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
819 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
820
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000821- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
822
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000823Tools/Demos
824-----------
825
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000826- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
827 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
828
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000829- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831Build
832-----
833
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000834- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
835 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
836 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
837 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
838 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
839 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
840 plans to do so.
841
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000842- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
843 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
844
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000845- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
846 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
847
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000848- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
849 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
850
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000851- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
852 GNU/k*BSD systems.
853
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000854- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
855 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
856
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000857C API
858-----
859
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000860..
861
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000862Documentation
863-------------
864
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000865- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
866 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
867
868- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
869 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
870 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000871
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000872New platforms
873-------------
874
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000875- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
876
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000877Tests
878-----
879
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000880..
881
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000882Windows
883-------
884
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000885- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
886 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
887 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
888 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
889 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
890 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
891 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
892 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
893 the problem.
894
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000895Mac
896---
897
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000898..
899
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000900
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000901What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
902=================================
903
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000904*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000905
906Core and builtins
907-----------------
908
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000909- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
910 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
911 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
912 sensitive code.
913
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000914- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000915 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000916
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000917 @staticmethod
918 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000919
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000920 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000921
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000922- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
923 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
924 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
925 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
926 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
927 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
928 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
929 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
930 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
931 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
932 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
933
934 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
935 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
936 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
937 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
938 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
939 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
940 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
941
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000942- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
943 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
944
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000945- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000946 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000947
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000948- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000949 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000950 which was missing for no apparent reason.
951
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000952- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000953 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
954 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
955
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000956- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
957 types that support garbage collection.
958
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000959- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
960
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000961- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
962 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
963 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
964 Jython.
965
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000966- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
967
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000968- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
969 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
970
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000971- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
972 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
973 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000974
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000975- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
976 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
977 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
978
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000979Extension modules
980-----------------
981
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000982- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
983
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000984Library
985-------
986
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000987- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
988 TIS-620
989
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000990- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
991 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
992 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
993 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
994 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
995 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
996 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
997 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
998 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
999 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1000
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001001- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1002
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001003- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1004 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1005 same as when the argument is omitted).
1006 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1007
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001008- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1009
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001010- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1011 schemes are offered.
1012
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001013- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1014
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001015- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1016 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1017 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1018
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001019- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1020
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001021- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1022 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1023
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001024- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1025 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1026 when dummy_threading is being used.
1027
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001028- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1029 from a tarfile.
1030
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001031- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001032 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001033
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001034- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1035 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1036 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1037 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1038
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001039- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1040 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1041
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001042- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1043 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1044 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1045 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1046 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1047 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1048 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1049 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1050 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1051 by some other method in progress).
1052
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001053- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1054 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1055 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001056
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001057- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1058
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001059- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1060 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1061 AM Kuchling.
1062
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001063- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1064 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1065 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1066
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001067- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1068 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1069 instead of unsigned.
1070
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001071- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001072 no longer part of the public API.
1073
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001074- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1075 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1076 string methods of the same name).
1077
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001078- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001079 SF patch 945642.
1080
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001081- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1082
1083 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1084
1085 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1086 DocTestSuites.
1087
1088- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1089 that provide thread-local data.
1090
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001091- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1092 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1093
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001094- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1095
1096- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1097 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1098 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1099
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001100- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1101
1102 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1103 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1104 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001105
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001106 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1107 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1108 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1109 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1110
1111 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1112 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1113
1114 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1115 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1116 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1117 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1118
1119 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1120 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1121 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1122 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1123 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1124
1125 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1126 wrapping help output.
1127
1128 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1129 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1130 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001131
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001132C API
1133-----
1134
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001135- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1136 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1137 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1138 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1139 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1140 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1141 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1142 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1143 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1144 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1145 its visible semantics have not changed.
1146
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001147- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1148 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1149
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001150Documentation
1151-------------
1152
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001153- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001154
1155 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001156 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001157
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001158 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001159
1160 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1161
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001162- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001163
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001164Tests
1165-----
1166
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001167- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001168 platforms that use the Makefile.
1169
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001170- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1171 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1172 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1173
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001174
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001175What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1176=================================
1177
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001178*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001179
1180Core and builtins
1181-----------------
1182
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001183- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1184 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1185 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1186 objects now (one object instead of three).
1187
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001188- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1189 Windows DLLs.
1190
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001191- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1192 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001193
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001194- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1195 a new .pyc magic.
1196
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001197- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1198 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1199 be there.
1200
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001201- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1202 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1203 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1204
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001205- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1206 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1207 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1208
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001209- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1210
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001211- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1212 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1213 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001214
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001215- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1216 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1217
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001218- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1219
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001220- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001221 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001222
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001223- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1224
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001225- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1226
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001227- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1228 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1229
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001230- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1231 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1232 Fixes bug #858016 .
1233
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001234- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1235 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1236 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1237
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001238- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1239 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1240 improves their performance (about 35%).
1241
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001242- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1243 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1244 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1245
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001246- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1247 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1248 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1249 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1250
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001251- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1252 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001253 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001254 length is not known).
1255
1256- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1257 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001258 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1259 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001260 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1261
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001262- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1263 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1264
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001265- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1266 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1267 keyword arguments.
1268
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001269- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1270 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1271 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1272
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001273- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1274 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1275 cases.
1276
1277- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1278 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1279 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1280 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1281 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1282 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1283 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1284 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1285 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1286 a release build.
1287
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001288- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1289 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1290
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001291- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001292 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001293
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001294- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1295 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1296 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1297 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1298 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1299 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1300 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1301 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1302 destroyed.
1303
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001304- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1305 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1306 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1307 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1308 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1309 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1310 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1311 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1312
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001313- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1314 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1315 character other than a space.
1316
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001317- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1318 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1319 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1320 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1321 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1322 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1323 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1324 attributes with the same name.
1325
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001326- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1327 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1328 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1329 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1330 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1331 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1332 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1333 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1334 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1335 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1336 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1337 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1338 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1339 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001340
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001341- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1342 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1343 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1344 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1345 This has been repaired.
1346
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001347- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1348
1349- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1350
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001351- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1352 over a sequence.
1353
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001354- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001355 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001356
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001357- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1358
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001359- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1360 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1361 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1362 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1363 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1364 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1365 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1366 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1367
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001368- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1369 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1370 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1371
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001372- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1373 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1374 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1375 freelist.
1376
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001377- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1378 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1379
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001380- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1381 number.
1382
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001383- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1384 a TypeError exception.
1385
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001386- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1387 820195.
1388
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001389- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1390 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1391 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1392
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001393- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001394 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1395 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001396
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001397- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1398 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1399 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1400
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001401- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1402 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001403 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001404
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001405- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001406 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1407 the first call.
1408
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001409
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001410Extension modules
1411-----------------
1412
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001413- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1414 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1415
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001416- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1417 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1418 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1419 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1420 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1421 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1422 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001423
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001424- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1425
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001426- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1427
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001428- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1429 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1430
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001431- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1432 fewer false positives.
1433
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001434- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1435 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1436
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001437- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001438 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1439
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001440- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001441 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001442 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001443 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1444 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001445
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001446- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1447 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1448 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1449 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1450
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001451- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1452 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1453 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1454 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1455 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1456 #897625.
1457
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001458- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1459 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1460
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001461- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1462 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1463 and pops on either side of the deque.
1464
1465- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1466 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1467
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001468- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1469 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1470 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1471 other functions that expect a function argument.
1472
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001473- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1474
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001475- os.getsid was added.
1476
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001477- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1478 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1479 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1480
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001481- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1482
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001483- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1484
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001485- readline.clear_history was added.
1486
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001487- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1488
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001489- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1490
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001491- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1492
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001493- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1494
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001495- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1496
1497- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1498
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001499- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1500
1501- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1502
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001503- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1504 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1505 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1506
1507- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1508 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1509 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1510 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1511 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1512 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1513 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1514
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001515- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1516 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1517 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1518 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001519
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001520- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001521 iterators from a single iterable.
1522
1523- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1524 of raising a TypeError exception.
1525
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001526- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1527 as parameter.
1528
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001529Library
1530-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001531
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001532- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1533 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1534 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001535
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001536- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1537 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1538 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001539
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001540- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001541
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001542- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1543 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001544
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001545- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1546 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1547
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001548- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1549
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001550- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001551 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001552
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001553- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001554 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001555
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001556- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1557
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001558- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1559 on cygwin and mingw32.
1560
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001561- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1562
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001563- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1564 module.
1565
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001566- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1567 installation scheme for all platforms.
1568
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001569- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001570 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001571
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001572- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1573 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1574 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1575
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001576- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1577 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1578 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1579
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001580- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1581
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001582- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1583
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001584- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1585 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1586
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001587- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1588 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1589 type pattern with the same value exists.
1590
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001591- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1592 when run from the command prompt).
1593
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001594- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1595 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1596
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001597- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1598 default sort).
1599
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001600- Added global runctx function to profile module
1601
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001602- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1603
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001604- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1605
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001606- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1607
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001608- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001609 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1610 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1611 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1612 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1613 accordingly.
1614
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001615- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1616 decoding standards.
1617
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001618- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1619 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1620 called for all requests.
1621
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001622- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1623 they are passed to the compiler.
1624
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001625- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1626 indent, width and depth.
1627
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001628- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1629 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1630
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001631- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1632 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1633
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001634- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1635
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001636- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1637
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001638- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1639
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001640- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1641 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1642
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001643- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001644 for better performance.
1645
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001646- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001647
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001648- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1649 a string).
1650
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001651- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1652
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001653- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1654
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001655- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1656
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001657- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1658
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001659- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1660 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1661 list of fieldnames.
1662
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001663- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1664 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1665
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001666- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1667
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001668- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1669 empty lists.
1670
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001671- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1672 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1673 and shelves.
1674
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001675- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1676 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1677
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001678- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001679 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1680 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001681
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001682- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1683 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001684 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001685
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001686- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001687 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1688 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1689
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001690- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1691 and removed in Py2.4.
1692
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001693- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1694
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001695- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1696
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001697Tools/Demos
1698-----------
1699
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001700- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1701 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1702
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001703- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1704
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001705- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1706 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1707 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1708 destination in situations where both files are given.
1709
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001710- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1711 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1712 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1713 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1714
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001715- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1716
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001717- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1718 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1719 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1720 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1721 now.
1722
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001723- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1724 in effect
1725
1726- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1727 C-c C-h
1728
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001729- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1730 -d option was given.
1731
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001732Build
1733-----
1734
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001735- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1736 build under OS X.
1737
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001738- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1739 --enable-profiling.
1740
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001741- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1742 is configured --with-tsc.
1743
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001744- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1745 on AMD64.
1746
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001747- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1748 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1749
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001750- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1751 removed.
1752
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001753- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1754 supported (see PEP 11).
1755
1756- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1757
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001758- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1759
1760- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1761 (see PEP 11).
1762
1763- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1764 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1765
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001766C API
1767-----
1768
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001769- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1770 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1771 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1772
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001773- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1774 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1775 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1776 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1777
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001778- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1779 generator objects.
1780
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001781- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1782 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001783 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1784 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001785
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001786- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1787 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1788
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001789- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1790 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1791 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1792 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1793 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1794
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001795- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1796 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1797 about 10% faster.
1798
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001799- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1800 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1801
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001802- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1803 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1804 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1805 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1806
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001807Windows
1808-------
1809
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001810- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1811 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1812 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1813 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1814
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001815- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1816 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1817 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1818
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001819
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001820What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1821===============================
1822
1823*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1824
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001825IDLE
1826----
1827
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001828- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1829 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1830 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1831 context-menu actions.
1832
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001833- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1834 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1835 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1836 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1837 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1838 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1839 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1840 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1841 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1842
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001843
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001844What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1845=============================================
1846
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001847*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001848
1849Core and builtins
1850-----------------
1851
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001852- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001853 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001854 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1855
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001856Extension modules
1857-----------------
1858
1859- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1860 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1861 than once. This has been fixed.
1862
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001863- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1864 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1865 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1866 call.
1867
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001868- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1869
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001870Library
1871-------
1872
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001873- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1874 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1875
1876- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1877 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1878 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1879 restored.
1880
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001881IDLE
1882----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001883
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001884- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001885
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001886Build
1887-----
1888
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001889- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1890 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1891
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001892C API
1893-----
1894
1895Windows
1896-------
1897
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001898- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1899 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1900
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001901- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1902
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001903Mac
1904---
1905
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001906- Various fixes to pimp.
1907
1908- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1909
1910- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1911 more problems than it solves.
1912
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001913
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001914What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1915=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001916
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001917*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1918
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001919Core and builtins
1920-----------------
1921
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001922- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1923 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1924
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001925- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1926 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001927 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001928
1929- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1930 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1931 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001932 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001933
1934- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1935 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001936
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001937- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1938 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1939 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1940
1941- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001942 770247.
1943
1944- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001945
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001946Extension modules
1947-----------------
1948
1949- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1950 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1951
1952- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1953
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001954- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1955
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001956- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1957 contained within the _strptime module.
1958
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001959- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1960 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1961
1962- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001963 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1964
1965- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1966 the find_class attribute, if present.
1967
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001968- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001969
1970 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1971 (SF bug 763298).
1972
1973 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001974 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1975 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1976 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001977
1978 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1979
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001980Library
1981-------
1982
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001983- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1984
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001985- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1986 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1987 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1988 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1989 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1990 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1991 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1992 or Tester().
1993
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001994- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1995 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1996 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1997 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1998 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1999 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2000 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2001 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2002 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002003
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002004 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002005
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002006- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2007 weren't before was an oversight.
2008
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002009- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2010 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2011
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002012- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2013 when there are no lines.
2014
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002015- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2016 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2017
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002018- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2019 to child processes.
2020
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002021- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2022
2023- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2024
2025- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2026 xmlrpclib.
2027
2028- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2029 responses.
2030
2031- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2032 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2033
2034- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2035 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2036 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2037
2038- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2039 used as patterns.
2040
2041- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2042 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2043 than Tk 8.3.
2044
2045- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2046
2047- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002048
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002049Tools/Demos
2050-----------
2051
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002052- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2053
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002054- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2055
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002056- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002057
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002058Build
2059-----
2060
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002061- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2062
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002063- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2064
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002065- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2066 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002067
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002068- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2069 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2070 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002071
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002072C API
2073-----
2074
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002075- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2076 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2077
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002078Windows
2079-------
2080
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002081- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2082 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2083 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2084 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2085 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2086 Python exception ::
2087
2088 thread.error: can't start new thread
2089
2090 is raised now.
2091
2092- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2093 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2094 instead of from DLL teardown.
2095
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002096Mac
2097---
2098
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002100 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002101 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2102 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2103 the executable in the bundle.
2104
2105- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002106
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002107- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2108
2109- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2110 on Panther.
2111
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002112What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2113================================
2114
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002115*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002116
2117Core and builtins
2118-----------------
2119
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002120- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2121 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2122 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2123 with the -i option.
2124
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002125- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2126 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2127
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002128- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2129 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2130
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002131- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2132 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2133 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2134 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2135 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2136 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2137 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2138 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2139 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2140 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2141 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2142 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2143 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002144
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002145- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2146 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2147 embedded in a lambda expression.
2148
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002149- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2150 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2151 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2152 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2153 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2154
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002155- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2156 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2157 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2158
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002159- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2160 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2161
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002162- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2163 It's writable again.
2164
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002165- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2166 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2167 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002168 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002169
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002170- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2171 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2172 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2173
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002174Extension modules
2175-----------------
2176
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002177- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2178 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2179
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002180- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2181 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2182 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2183 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2184
2185- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2186 collection.
2187
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002188- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2189 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2190 unique within a single program run.
2191
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002192- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2193 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2194
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002195- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2196 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2197
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002198- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2199 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002200
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002201- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2202
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002203- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2204 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2205
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002206- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2207 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2208 for many BSD-derived systems.
2209
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002210
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002211Library
2212-------
2213
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002214- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2215 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2216 primary ones:
2217
2218 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2219 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2220 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2221
2222 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2223 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2224 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2225 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2226 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2227 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2228
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002229- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2230 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2231 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2232 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2233 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2234 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2235 argument.
2236
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002237- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2238 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2239 in the archive.
2240
2241- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2242 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2243
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002244- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2245 569574).
2246
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002247- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2248 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2249 no more.
2250
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002251- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2252 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2253 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2254 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2255 code coverage.
2256
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002257- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2258 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2259 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002260 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2261 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002262
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002263- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2264 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2265 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002266 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002267
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002268- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2269
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002270- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2271 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2272 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2273 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2274
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002275- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2276 handling.
2277
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002278- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2279 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2280
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002281- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2282 in socket.py.
2283
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002284- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2285
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002286- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2287 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2288 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2289 opener with proxy support.
2290
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002291- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2292
2293- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2294
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002295Tools/Demos
2296-----------
2297
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002298- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2299
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002300- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2301
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002302- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2303 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002304
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002305- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2306 files.
2307
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002308Build
2309-----
2310
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002311- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002312 different root directory.
2313
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002314C API
2315-----
2316
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002317- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2318 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2319 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2320 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2321 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2322 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2323 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2324 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2325 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2326 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2327
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002328- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2329 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2330 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2331 from Python.
2332
2333
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002334New platforms
2335-------------
2336
2337None this time.
2338
2339Tests
2340-----
2341
2342- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2343 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2344
2345Windows
2346-------
2347
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002348- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2349
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002350- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2351 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2352 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2353 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2354 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2355 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2356 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2357 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2358 that's what it's for.
2359
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002360Mac
2361---
2362
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002363- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2364 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2365 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2366 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002367- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2368 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2369- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002370
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002371SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2372------------------------------------
2373
2374430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2375598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2376622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2377661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2378683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2379697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2380713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2381724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2382727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2383729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2384730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2385731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2386732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2387733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2388735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2389740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2390744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2391745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2392747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2393749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2394751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2395753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2396755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2397757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2398760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2399
2400
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002401What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2402================================
2403
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002404*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002405
2406Core and builtins
2407-----------------
2408
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002409- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2410 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2411
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002412- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2413 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2414 and cannot be strings).
2415
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002416- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2417 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2418 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2419 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2420
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002421- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2422 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2423 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2424 Python itself.
2425
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002426- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2427 the referenced object, if it has one.
2428
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002429- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2430 the thread started at
2431 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2432
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002433- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2434 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2435 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2436 placed on a list index.
2437
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002438- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2439 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2440 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2441 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2442
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002443- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2444 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2445 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2446 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2447 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2448 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2449 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2450
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002451- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2452 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2453 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2454 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2455 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2456
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002457- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2458 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002459
2460- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2461 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2462 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2463 #693195.)
2464
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002465- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2466 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002467
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002468- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002469 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002470 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2471 interpreter executions, would fail.
2472
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002473- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002474 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002475 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002476
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002477Extension modules
2478-----------------
2479
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002480- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2481 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2482 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2483 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2484
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002485- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2486 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2487
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002488- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2489 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2490 and Greg Chapman.)
2491
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002492- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2493 recursively.
2494
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002495- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002496 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2497 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2498 leaks.
2499
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002500- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2501
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002502- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2503 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2504 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2505 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2506 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2507 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2508 #705836.
2509
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002510- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002511 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2512
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002513- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2514 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2515 See SF bug #692416.
2516
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002517- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2518 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2519
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002520- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2521 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2522 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002523
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002524- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002525 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2526 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2527
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002528- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2529 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2530 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2531 timeouts to work properly.
2532
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002533Library
2534-------
2535
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002536- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2537 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2538 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2539 future release.
2540
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002541- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2542 for querying platform dependent features.
2543
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002544- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002545
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002546- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2547 pickle protocol versions.
2548
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002549- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2550 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2551 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2552
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002553- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2554
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002555- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2556 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2557 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2558 modules.
2559
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002560- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2561 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2562 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2563
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002564- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2565 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2566
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002567- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2568 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2569 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2570
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002571- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002572 MS Office extensions.
2573
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002574- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2575 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2576
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002577- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2578 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2579
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002580- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2581 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2582 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2583 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2584 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2585 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2586
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002587- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2588 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2589 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002590
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002591- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2592 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2593 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2594
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002595- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2596
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002597- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2598 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2599 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2600
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002601Tools/Demos
2602-----------
2603
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002604- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2605 See the module docstring for details.
2606
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002607Build
2608-----
2609
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002610- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2611 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002612
2613C API
2614-----
2615
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002616- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2617
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002618- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2619 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2620 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2621
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002622- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2623 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002624
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002625 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2626 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2627 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002628
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002629- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002630 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2631
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002632- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2633 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2634 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002635
2636New platforms
2637-------------
2638
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002639None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002640
2641Tests
2642-----
2643
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002644- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2645 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002646
2647Windows
2648-------
2649
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002650- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2651 function.
2652
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002653- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2654 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002655
2656Mac
2657---
2658
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002659- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2660 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002661
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002662- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2663 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002664
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002665- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2666 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2667 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002668
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002669- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002670 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2671 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002672
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002673- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2674 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002675
2676
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002677What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2678=================================
2679
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002680*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002681
2682Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002683-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002684
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002685- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2686 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2687 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2688
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002689- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2690 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2691 (SF patch #664376.)
2692
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002693- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2694 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2695 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2696 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2697 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2698 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002699 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002700
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002701- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2702 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2703 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2704 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002705 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002706
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002707- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2708 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2709 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2710 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2711 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2712 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2713 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2714 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2715 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2716 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2717 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2718
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002719- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2720 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2721 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2722 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2723 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2724 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2725
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002726- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2727 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2728
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002729- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2730 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2731 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2732 case.)
2733
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002734- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2735 passed as unicode strings.
2736
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002737- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2738 See SF bug #683467.
2739
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002740- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2741 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2742
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002743- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2744
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002745- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2746
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002747- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2748 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2749 arguments.
2750
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002751- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2752 See SF bug #667147.
2753
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002754- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002755 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002756 See SF bug #676155.
2757
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002758- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002759 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002760 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2761 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2762 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2763 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2764 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2765 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002766
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002767Extension modules
2768-----------------
2769
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002770- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2771 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2772 tp_as_number pointer.
2773
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002774- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2775 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2776 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2777 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2778 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2779
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002780- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2781
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002782- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2783
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002784- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002785 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002786 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2787 patch #678531.)
2788
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002789- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2790 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2791
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002792- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2793 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2794
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002795- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2796
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002797- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2798 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2799 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002801- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2802
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002803- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2804 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2805
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002806- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002807
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002808- datetime changes:
2809
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002810 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2811
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002812 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2813 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2814 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2815 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2816 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2817 now.
2818
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002819 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002820 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2821 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002822
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002823 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002824 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002825 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2826 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2827 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2828 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002829
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002830 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2831 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2832 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002833 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2834
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002835 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2836 by a later example coded by Guido.
2837
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002838 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002839 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2840 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2841 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002842 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2843 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2844
2845 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2846 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2847 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2848 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2849 tzinfo subclass instance.
2850
2851 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2852 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2853 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2854 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2855 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2856 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2857 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2858 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002859
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002860 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2861 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2862 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2863 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2864 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002865 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2866
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002867 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002868
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002869 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2870 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2871 as a naive datetime object.
2872
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002873 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2874 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2875 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2876
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002877 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2878 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2879 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2880 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2881 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2882 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2883 comparison.
2884
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002885 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2886 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2887 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2888 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002889 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002890
2891 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002892
2893 and ::
2894
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002895 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2896
2897 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2898 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2899 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2900 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2901
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002902 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2903 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2904 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2905 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2906 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2907
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002908 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2909 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002910 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2911 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002912
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002913Library
2914-------
2915
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002916- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2917 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2918
2919- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2920 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2921 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2922 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2923 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2924 See PEP 307 for details.
2925
2926- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2927 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2928
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002929- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2930 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002931 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002932 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2933 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002934 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002935
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002936- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2937 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2938
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002939- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2940 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2941 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2942
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002943- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2944
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002945- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2946 exception.
2947
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002948- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2949 class.
2950
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002951- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2952 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2953 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2954
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002955- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2956 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2957
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002958- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002959 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2960 See SF bug #659228.
2961
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002962- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2963 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2964 See SF patch #651082.
2965
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002966- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002967
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002968- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2969 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2970
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002971- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002972 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002973
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002974- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2975 DOS paths from other platforms.
2976
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002977Tools/Demos
2978-----------
2979
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002980- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2981 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2982 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2983 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2984 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2985 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2986 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2987 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2988 example:
2989
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002990 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2991 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002992
2993 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2994
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002995
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002996Build
2997-----
2998
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002999- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3000 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3001 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003002 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3003
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003004 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3005
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003006- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3007 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3008 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3009 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3010 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3011 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3012 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3013 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3014 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3015
3016- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3017 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3018 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3019 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3020
3021- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3022 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3023
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003024C API
3025-----
3026
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003027- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3028 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003029
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003030- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3031 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3032 tp_as_number pointer.
3033
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003034- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3035 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3036 (SF #681367)
3037
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003038- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3039 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3040 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3041 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003042
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003043Tests
3044-----
3045
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003046- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003047 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3048 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3049 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3050 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3051 pydoc.)
3052
3053- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3054
3055- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003056
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003057Windows
3058-------
3059
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003060- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3061 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3062 time).
3063
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003064- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3065 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3066
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003067- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3068 release without strong cryptography.
3069
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003070- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003071 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003072
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003073- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3074 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3075
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003076Mac
3077---
3078
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003079- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3080 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003081
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003082- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3083 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3084 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003085
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003086- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3087 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003088
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003089- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3090 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3091 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3092 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003093
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003094- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003095 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3096 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3097 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003098
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003099
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003100What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003101=================================
3102
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003103*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003105Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003107
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003108- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3109
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003110- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3111 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003112 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003113 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003114 a different meaning than before.
3115
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003116- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003117 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003118 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003119
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003120- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003121 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003122 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003123
3124- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3125 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3126 and deallocation.
3127
3128- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3129 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3130
3131- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3132 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3133 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3134 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3135 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3136
3137- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3138 now detected by the garbage collector.
3139
3140- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3141 [SF bug 519621]
3142
3143- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3144 identifier.
3145
3146- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3147 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3148 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3149 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3150 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3151 [SF bug 563060]
3152
3153- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3154 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3155 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3156 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3157 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3158
3159- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3160 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3161 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3162
3163- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3164
3165- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3166 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3167 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3168 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3169 state of the slots would be lost.)
3170
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003171Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003173
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003174- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003175 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3176 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3177 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3178 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003179 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3180 Jython 2.1.
3181
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003182- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003183 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003184 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3185 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3186 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3187 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3188 these, see PEP 302.
3189
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003190- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3191 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3192 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3193
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003194- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3195 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3196 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3197
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003198- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3199 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3200 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3201
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003202- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3203 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3204 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3205 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3206 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3207 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3208 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3209 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3210 releases or implementations.
3211
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003212- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003213 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3214 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003215
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003216- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3217 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3218
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003219- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3220 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3221 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3222
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003223- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3224 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3225
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003226- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3227 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003228 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3229 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003230
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003231- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3232 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3233 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3234 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3235 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3236
3237 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3238 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3239 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3240 pattern.
3241
3242 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3243 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3244 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3245 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3246
3247 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3248 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3249 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3250 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3251 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3252 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3253
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003254- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3255 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3256 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3257 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3258 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3259 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3260 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3261 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003262
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003263- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3264 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3265 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3266 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3267 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003268 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3269 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3270 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3271 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3272 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3273 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3274 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003275
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003276- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3277 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3278
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003279- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3280 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3281 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3282 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3283 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3284 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3285 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3286 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3287 to Zack Weinberg!
3288
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003289- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3290 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3291 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3292 type. This has been fixed now.
3293
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003294- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3295 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3296 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3297
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003298- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3299 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3300 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3301 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3302 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3303 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3304 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3305 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003306 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003307
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003308- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3309 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3310 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003311
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003312- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3313 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3314 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3315 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3316 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3317 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3318 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3319 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003320 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003321 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3322 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3323
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003324- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3325 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3326 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3327 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3328 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3329 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3330 this.)
3331
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003332- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3333 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003334 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003335 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003336 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3337 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003338 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3339 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003340
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003341- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3342 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3343 currently running.
3344
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003345- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3346 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3347 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3348 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3349
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003350- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3351 as directory names.
3352
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003353- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3354 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3355
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003356- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3357 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3358
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003359- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003360 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3361 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003362
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003363- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3364 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3365 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3366 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3367 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3368
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003369- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3370 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3371 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3372 removed.
3373
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003374- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3375 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3376 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3377
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003378- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3379 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3380 to __debug__.
3381
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003382- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3383 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3384 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3385
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003386- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3387 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3388 deprecated now.
3389
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003390- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3391 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3392 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003393
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003394- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3395 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3396 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3397 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3398 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003399
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003400- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3401 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3402
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003403- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3404 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3405 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003406 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003407 is backward compatible.
3408
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003409- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3410 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3411 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3412 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3413 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3414
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003415- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3416 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3417 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3418 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3419 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3420 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003421
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003422- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3423 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3424
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003425- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3426 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3427
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003428- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3429 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3430 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3431 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3432 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3433
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003434- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3435 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3436 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3437
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003438- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003439 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3440
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003441- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3442 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3443 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003444
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003445- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3446 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3447
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003448- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3449 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3450 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3451
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003452- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3453
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003454Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003456
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003457- Added three operators to the operator module:
3458 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3459 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3460 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3461
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003462- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3463
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003464- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3465 archives.
3466
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003467- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3468 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3469 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3470
3471 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3472
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003473- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3474 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3475 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003476 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003477
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003478- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3479 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3480 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3481 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003482 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3483 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3484 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3485 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003486
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003487- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3488 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003489
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003490- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3491
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003492- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3493 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3494
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003495- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3496 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3497 supported.
3498
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003499- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3500
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003501- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3502 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003503
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003504- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3505 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3506
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003507- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3508
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003509- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3510 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3511
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003512- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3513 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3514 functions but callable type objects.
3515
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003516- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003517 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003518 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003519
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003520- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3521 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003522
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003523- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3524 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003525
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003526- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3527 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3528 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3529 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3530
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003531- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3532 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003533
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003534- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3535 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3536 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3537 and __imul__.
3538
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003539- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003540 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3541 is called.
3542
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003543- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3544 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3545 interpreter was compiled.
3546
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003547- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3548 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3549 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003550 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003551 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3552 1, not 2.
3553
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003554- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3555 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3556 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3557 limit.
3558
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003559- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3560 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3561 bug #623464.
3562
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003563- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3564 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3565 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3566 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3567
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003568Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003570
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003571- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3572
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003573- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3574 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3575 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3576 with Python 2.3a2.
3577
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003578- os.path exposes getctime.
3579
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003580- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003581 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003582 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003583 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003584 unit tests of floating point results.
3585
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003586- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3587 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3588 has been increased.
3589
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003590- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3591 executed.
3592
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003593- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3594 postinstallation script.
3595
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003596- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3597 test the current module.
3598
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003599- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003600 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3601 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3602 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3603 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3604
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003605- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003606 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003607 Ward's Optik package.
3608
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003609- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3610 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3611 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3612 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3613
3614- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3615 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003616 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003617
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003618- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3619 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3620 shelf are binary pickles.
3621
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003622- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3623 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3624
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003625- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3626 modules are iterators now.
3627
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003628- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3629 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3630 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3631 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3632 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3633 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003634
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003635- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3636 with their entity value.
3637
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003638- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3639
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003640- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3641 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003642
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003643- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3644 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003645 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003646
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003647- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3648 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3649 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3650 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3651 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3652 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3653 main():
3654
3655 import locale
3656 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3657
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003658- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3659 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3660
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003661- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3662 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3663 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3664 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3665 to the new standard.
3666
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003667- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3668 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3669 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3670 an extension to the database.
3671
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003672- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3673 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3674 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3675 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003676 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003677
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003678- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003679 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003680
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003681- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3682 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3683 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3684 bounded integers.
3685
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003686- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3687 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3688 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3689 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3690 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3691 in existence.
3692
3693 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3694 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3695 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3696 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3697 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3698 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3699
3700 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3701 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3702 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3703 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3704
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003705- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3706 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3707 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3708
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003709- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3710
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003711- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3712 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3713 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3714 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3715
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003716- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3717 argument.
3718
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003719- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3720 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3721 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3722 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3723 [SF patch 560794].
3724
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003725- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3726 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3727 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003728 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3729 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3730 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003731
3732- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3733 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003734
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003735- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3736 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3737 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3738 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003739
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003740- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3741 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3742 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3743 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3744 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3745
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003746- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003747
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003748- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3749
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003750- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3751 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3752 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3753 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3754 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3755 identical to None.
3756
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003757- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3758 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3759 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3760 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3761 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3762 results now.
3763
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003764- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3765 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3766
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003767- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3768 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3769 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3770 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3771 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3772 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3773 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3774 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3775
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003776- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3777
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003778- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3779 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3780
3781- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3782 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3783 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3784 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3785 and other systems.
3786
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003787- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3788 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3789 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3790 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 +00003791 work well with these.
3792
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003793- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3794
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003795- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003796 connections.
3797
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003798- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3799 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3800 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3801
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003802- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3803 sets
3804
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003805- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3806 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3807 name.
3808
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003809- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3810 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3811 passed in.
3812
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003813- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003814 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003815 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3816 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003817
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003818- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3819
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003820- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3821
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003822- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3823 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3824 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3825
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003826- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3827 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3828 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3829 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003830 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003831
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003832- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003833 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003834 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003835
3836- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3837 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3838 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3839
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003840- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003841 the value of its expression argument.
3842
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003843- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3844 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3845 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3846
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003847- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3848 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3849 skipstone browser was included.
3850
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003851- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3852 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3853
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003854Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003856
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003857- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3858 names in addition to accepting file names.
3859
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003860- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3861 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3862 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3863 still used and useful.)
3864
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003865- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3866 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3867 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3868 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003869
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003870- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3871 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3872 the generated binary.
3873
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003874Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003876
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003877- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3878
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003879- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3880 except in the hands of experts.
3881
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003882- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003883 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3884 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3885 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003886
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003887- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3888 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3889 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3890 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3891 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3892 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3893 builds.
3894
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003895- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3896 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3897 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3898 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3899 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3900 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3901 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3902 new type.
3903
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003904- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003905
3906 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3907 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3908 positive infinities.
3909
3910 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3911 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3912 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3913 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3914 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3915 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3916 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3917
3918 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3919
3920 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3921
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003922- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3923 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3924 size of the executable.
3925
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003926- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3927 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3928 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3929 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003930
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003931- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3932
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003933- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3934 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3935 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003936
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003937- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3938 well as Unix.
3939
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003940- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3941 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3942 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3943 modules in the README file for details.
3944
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003945C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003947
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003948- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3949 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003950 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003951 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003952 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003953
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003954- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3955 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3956 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3957 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3958 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3959 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003960 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003961 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3962 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3963 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3964 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3965 aligned.)
3966
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003967- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3968 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3969 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3970
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003971- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3972 level.
3973
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003974- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3975 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3976 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3977 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3978 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3979
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003980- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3981 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3982 code.
3983
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003984- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3985 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3986 adjusting for negative indices.
3987
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003988- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3989 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3990 object.
3991
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003992- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3993 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3994 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3995
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003996- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3997 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003998
3999- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4000
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004001- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4002 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4003 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4004 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4005
4006- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4007
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004008- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004009
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004010- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004011 without going through the buffer API.
4012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004014
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004015- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4016 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4017 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4018 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4019
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004020- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4021 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4022
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004023- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004024 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004028
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004029- OpenVMS is now supported.
4030
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004031- AtheOS is now supported.
4032
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004033- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4034
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004035- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4036
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004037Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-----
4039
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004040- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4041 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4042 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004043
4044Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004046
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004047- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4048 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4049 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4050 bugs.
4051 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004052 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004053 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4054 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004055 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004056
4057- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004058 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004059
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004060- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4061 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4062
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004063- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4064 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004065 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004066 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4067
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004068- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4069 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4070 use files" uninstall option).
4071
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004072- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4073
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004074- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4075 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4076
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004077- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4078 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4079 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4080
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004081- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4082 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4083 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4084 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4085 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004086 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4087 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4088 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004089
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004090- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004091 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004092 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4093 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4094 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4095 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4096 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4097 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4098 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4099 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4100 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4101 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4102 work around.
4103
4104- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4105 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4106 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4107 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4108 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4109 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4110 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4111 specified with O_CREAT too).
4112
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004113Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114----
4115
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004116- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004117
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004118- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4119 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4120 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4121
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004122- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4123 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4124 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4125
4126- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4127 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4128 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4129 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4130 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4131 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4132 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4133 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004134
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004135- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4136 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4137 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004138
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004139- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4140 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4141 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4142 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4143 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004144
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004145- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4146 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4147 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004148
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004149- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4150 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004151
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004152- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4153 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4154 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4155 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4156 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004157
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004158- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4159 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4160 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4161
4162- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4163 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4164 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004165
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004166- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4167 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4168 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4169 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004170 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004171
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004172- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4173 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004174
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004175- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4176 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004177
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004178- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004179 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004180 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4181 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004182
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004183
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004184What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004185===============================
4186
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4188
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004189Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004191
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004192- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4193 with a custom metaclass.
4194
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004195Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004197
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004198- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4199 are proxies.
4200
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004201Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004203
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004204- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4205 very short strings.
4206
4207- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4208 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4209 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4210 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4211 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4212
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004213Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004215
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004216- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4217 close or delete time).
4218
4219- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4220 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4221
4222- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4223
4224- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004225 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004226
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004227Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004229
4230Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004232
4233C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004235
4236New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004238
4239Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004241
4242Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004244
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004245- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4246
4247- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4248 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4249
4250- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4251 deleted at process exit time.
4252
4253- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4254 in backslash.
4255
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004256Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004258
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004259- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4260 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4261 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4262
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004263
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004264What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004265===========================
4266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4268
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004269Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004271
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004272- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4273 been extensively updated. See
4274
4275 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4276
4277 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4278
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004279- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4280 deleted!
4281
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004282- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4283 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4284 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4285 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4286 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4287
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004288- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4289
4290 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4291 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4292
4293 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4294 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4295 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4296 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4297 supported anyway.
4298
4299 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4300 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4301
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004302- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4303 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4304 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4305 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4306 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004307
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004308- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4309 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4310 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4311
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004312Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004314
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004315- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4316 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4317 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4318 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4319 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4320 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004321 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4322 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4323 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4324 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004325
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004326- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4327 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4328 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4329
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004330Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004332
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004333- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4334
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004335Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004337
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004338- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4339 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4340 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4341 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4342 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4343 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4344
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004345- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4346
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004347- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4348
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004349- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4350
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004351- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4352 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4353 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4354
4355- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4356
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004357Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004359
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004360- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4361 off a search on Google.
4362
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004363Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004365
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004366- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4367 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4368 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4369 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4370 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4371 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4372 other platforms should do likewise.
4373
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004374- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4375 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4376 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4377
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004378C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004380
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004381- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4382 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4383 producing key-value pairs.
4384
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004385- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004386 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004387 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4388 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4389 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4390 previously went unchallenged.
4391
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004392New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004394
4395Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004397
4398Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004400
4401Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004403
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004404- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4405 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004406
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004407- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4408 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4409 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4410 home.
4411
4412
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004413What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004414===========================
4415
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4417
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004420
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004421- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4422 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004423
4424 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004425 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004426
4427 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4428 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004429 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004430 This needs to be documented.
4431
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004432- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4433 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4434
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004435- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4436 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4437 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4438
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004439- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4440 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4441
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004442- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4443 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4444 class forbids it).
4445
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004446- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4447 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4448 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4449
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004450- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004452Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004454
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004455- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4456 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004457 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004458
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004459- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4460 (like 1 + '').
4461
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004462Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004464
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004465- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4466 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4467 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4468 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004469 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004470 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4471
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004472- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4473 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4474 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4475 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4476
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004477- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4478 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004479 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4480 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4481 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004482
4483- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4484 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004485
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004486- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4487 bytes on its input.
4488
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004489Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004491
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004492- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004493 convenience function.
4494
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004495- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4496 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4497 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004498 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4499 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4500 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4501 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4502 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4503 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004504
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004505- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4506 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4507 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4508 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4509
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004510- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4511 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4512 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4513
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004514- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4515 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4516 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4517 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4518
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004519- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4520 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004522 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4523 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4524 new -l and -e options.
4525
4526- statcache is now deprecated.
4527
4528- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4529 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004531 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4532 time properly taken into account.
4533
4534- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4535 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4536 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4537 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4538
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004541
4542Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004544
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004545- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4546 is built with libdb3 if available.
4547
4548- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4549
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004550C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004552
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004553- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4554 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4555 PySequence_Size().
4556
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004557- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4558
4559- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4560 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4561 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4562
4563- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4564 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4565
4566- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4567 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4568
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004571
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004572- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4573 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4574
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004575- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4576 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4577
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004578- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004580Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004582
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004583- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4584 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4585
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004586Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004588
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004589Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004591
4592- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4593 removed completely in the next release.
4594
4595- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4596 OSX.
4597
4598- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4599 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4600
4601- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4602
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004603
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004605===========================
4606
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4608
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004609Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004611
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004612- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004613 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004614 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004615 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4616 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004617 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4618 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004619 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4620 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004621
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004622- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4623 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4624
4625- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4626 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4627
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004628Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004630
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004631- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4632 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4633 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4634 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4635 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4636 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4637 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4638 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4639
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004640- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4641 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4642 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4643 example).
4644
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004645- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004646 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004647 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004648 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004649
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004650- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4651 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4652 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004653 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004654
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004655- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4656 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4657 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4658 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4659 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4660 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4661
4662 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4663
4664 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4665
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004668
4669- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4670
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004671- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4672
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004673- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4674 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004675
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004676- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4677 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4678 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4679 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4680 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4681 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004682 attributes.
4683
4684- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4685 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4686 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004687
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004688- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4689 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4690 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004691
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004692- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4693 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4694 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004695 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4696 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4697
4698- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4699 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004700
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004701Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004703
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004704- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4705 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4706
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004707- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4708 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4709 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4710 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4711
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004712- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4713 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4714 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4715 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4716
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004717 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4718 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4719 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4720 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4721 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4722 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4723 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4724 without losing information).
4725
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004726- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004727 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4728 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4729 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4730 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4731 module).
4732
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004733 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004734 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4735 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4736 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4737 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004738
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004739- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004740 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4741 encoding.
4742
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004743- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4744 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004747 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4748
4749- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4750 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4751 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4752 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4753
4754- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4755
4756- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4757 ON, and OFF.
4758
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004759- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4760 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4761
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004762Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004764
4765- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4766 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4767 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004768
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004769- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4770 been added: -X and -E.
4771
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004772Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004774
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004775- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4776 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4777
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004778C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004780
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004781- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4782 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4783 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4784 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4785 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4786
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004787- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4788 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4789 as long) arguments.
4790
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004791- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4792 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4793 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4794 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4795 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4796 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4797
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004798- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4799 input.
4800
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004801New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004803
4804Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004806
4807Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004809
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004810- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4811 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4812 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4813
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004814- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4815 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4816 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004817 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004818
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4820 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4821 import signal
4822 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004823
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004825 while 1:
4826 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004828 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4829 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4830 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4831 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004832
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004834What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4835===========================
4836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4838
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004839Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004841
4842- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4843 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4844 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4845
4846- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4847 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4848 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4849 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4850 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4851 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4852 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004853
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004854- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004855 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004856 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4857 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4858 associate a docstring with a property.
4859
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004860- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4861 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4862 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4863 other built-in object types.
4864
4865- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4866 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4867 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4868 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4869 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4870
4871- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4872 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4873
4874- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4875 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004876 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004877 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4878 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4879 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4880 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4881 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4882
4883- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4884 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4885 class.
4886
4887- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4888 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4889 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4890 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4891
4892- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4893 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4894 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4895 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4896
4897- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4898 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4899
4900- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4901 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4902 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4903 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4904 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004905 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004906 with the same value as s.
4907
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004908- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4909
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004910Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004912
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004913- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4914
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004915- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4916 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4917 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4918 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4919 objects.
4920
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004921- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4922 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004923 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4924 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4925
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004926- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4927 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4928 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4929
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004930Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004932
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004933- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4934 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4935 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4936 by the instances.
4937
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004938- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4939 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4940 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4941
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004942- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4943 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4944 before the entire comparison is complete.
4945
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004946- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4947 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4948 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4949
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004950- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4951 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4952 getwriter().
4953
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004954- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4955 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4956
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004957- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004958 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4959 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4960
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004961- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4962 iterable object.
4963
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004964- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4965 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004966
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004967- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4968 authentication.
4969
4970- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4971 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004972
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004973- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004974 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4975 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4976 a sample driver.)
4977
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004978Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004980
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004981- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4982 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4983 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4984 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4985 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4986 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4987 kernel has large file support.
4988
4989- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4990 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4991 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4992 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4993 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4994
4995- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4996 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4997 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4998
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004999C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005001
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005002- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5003 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5004
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005005New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005007
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005008- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5009 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5010
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005011Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005013
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005014- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5015 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5016 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5017 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5018 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5019
5020- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5021 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5022 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5023 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5024
5025- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5026 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5027
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005030
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005031- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005032 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5033 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005034
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005035
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005036What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5037===========================
5038
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5040
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005041Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005043
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005044- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5045 big to represent as a C double.
5046
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005047- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5048 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5049 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5050 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5051 restriction).
5052
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005053- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5054 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5055 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5056 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5057 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5058
5059 >>> dir([])
5060 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5061 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5062 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5063 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5064 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5065 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5066 'reverse', 'sort']
5067
5068 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5069
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005070- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005071 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5072 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5073 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5074 OverflowError exception.
5075
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005076- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005077 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005078 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5079 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5080 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5081 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5082 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005083 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5085 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5086
5087 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5088 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5089 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5090 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005091
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005092- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005093 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5094 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5095 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5096 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5097 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5098 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5099 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5100 once it is created.
5101
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005102- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5103 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5104 (key, value) pairs.
5105
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005106- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005107 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5108 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5109
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005110- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5111 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5112 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5113 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5114 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005115
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005116- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005117 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5118 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5119
5120 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005122- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005123 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5124
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005125Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005127
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005128- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005129 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5130 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005131
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005132- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5133 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5134 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5135 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5136 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5137 in this area anymore).
5138
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005139- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5140 threading.Timer.
5141
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005142- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5143 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5144
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005145- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005146 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5147
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005148- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005149 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5150 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5151 converted to Python longs.
5152
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005153- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005154 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5155
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005156- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5157 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5158 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5159
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005160Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005162
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005163- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5164 division operators as per PEP 238.
5165
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005166Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005168
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005169- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5170 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5171 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5172 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5173
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005174C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005176
5177- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005178
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005179- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5180 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005181 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005182
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5184 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005185 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005187
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005188- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005189 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5190 module:
5191
5192 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005193
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005194 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5195 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005196
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005197 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5198 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005199
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005200 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5201
5202 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5203
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005204- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005205 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5206 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5207 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005208
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005209New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005211
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005212- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5213 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5214 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5215 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5216 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005218Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005220
5221Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005223
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005224- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5225 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5226 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5227 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005228 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5229 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5230 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5231 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5232 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005234- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005235 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5236
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005237
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005238What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5239===========================
5240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5242
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005243Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005245
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005246- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5247 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5248
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005249- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5250 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5251 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005252
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005253- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5254 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5255 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5256 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005257
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005258- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005261
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005262Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005263-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005264
5265- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005266 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005267 the module docstring for details.
5268
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005269Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005271
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005272- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005273 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5274 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5275 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005276
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005277- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5278 Nick Mathewson.
5279
5280Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005282
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005283- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5284 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5285 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5286 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5287 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5288 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5289 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5290 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5291
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005292- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5293 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5294 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5295 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5296
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005297- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5298 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5299 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5300 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5301 come a long way).
5302
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005303- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5304 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5305 write filters for these warnings).
5306
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005307- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5308 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5309 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5310 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5311 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5312
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005313- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5314 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5315 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5316 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5317 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5318 older distribution.
5319
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005320Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005322
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005323- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5324 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005325 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005326
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005327- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5328 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5329 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5330
5331- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5332
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005333- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5334
5335- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5336
5337- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5338
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005340
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005341- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5342
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005343New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005345
5346C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005348
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005349- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5350 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5351 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5352 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5353 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5354 against buffer overruns.
5355
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005356- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005357 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5358 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005359 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5360 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5361 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5362
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005363- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5364 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5365 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5366 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5367 deprecated.
5368
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005369Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005371
5372- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5373 relevant is found.
5374
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005375
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005376What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005377===========================
5378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5380
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005381Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005383
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005384- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5385 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5386 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5387 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5388 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5389 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5390 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5391 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005392 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005393 repaired.
5394
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005395- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005396 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005397 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5398 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5399 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5400 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5401 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5402 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5403 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5404 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5405
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005406- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5407 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5408 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5409 leading BMO character).
5410
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005411- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5412 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5413 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5414
5415 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5416 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5417 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005418
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005419 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5420 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5421 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5422 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5423 for various simple to use conversions.
5424
5425 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5426 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5429 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5430 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5431 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5432 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5433 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5434 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5435 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5436 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5437 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5438 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5439 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5440 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5441 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5442 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005443
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005444- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5445 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5446 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005447 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005448 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005449
5450 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005451 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5452 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5453 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5454 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5455 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005456 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5457 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005458
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005459 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5460 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5461 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005462 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005463
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005464- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5465 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5466 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5467 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5468 floating arithmetic,
5469
5470 x = 9007199254740992.0
5471 print long(x)
5472
5473 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5474 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5475 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5476 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5477 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5478 functions are of good quality).
5479
5480 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5481 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5482 algorithms to break.
5483
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005484- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5485 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5486 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5487 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5488 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5489 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5490 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5491 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5492 order.
5493
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005494- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5495 operation along the most common code paths.
5496
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005497- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5498 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5499
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005500- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5501 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5502 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5503 {}.update(UserDict())
5504
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005505- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5506 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5507 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5508 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5509 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5510 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5511 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5512 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5513
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005514- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005515 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005516
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005517 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005518 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5519 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005520 join() method of strings
5521 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005522 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5523 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005524 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005525 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005526
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005527- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5528 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5529
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005530- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5531 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5532
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005533- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5534 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5535 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5536 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5537
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005538- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5539 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005540 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005541 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5542 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005543
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005544- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5545
5546
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005547Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005549
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005550- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005551 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005552 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5553 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5554
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005555- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5556 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5557
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005558- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5559 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5560 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5561 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5562
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005563- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5564 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5565 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5566
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005567- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5568
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005569- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5570
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005571- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5572 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5573 that are still imported into string.py).
5574
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005575- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5576
5577- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5578 Now it does.
5579
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005580- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5581
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005582- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5583 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5584 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5585 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5586 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005587 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5588 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005589
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005590- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5591 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5592 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5593 'help(object)'.
5594
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005595Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005597
5598- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005599 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005600 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5601 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5602
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005603- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005604 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5605 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005606
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005607C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005609
5610- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5611 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612
5613----
5614
5615**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**