blob: 514df3c896505bbd028fed0c26abec8a3b0592be [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
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000015- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
16
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000017- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
18
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000019- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
20
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000021- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
22 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
23
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000024- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
25 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
26 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
27
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000028- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
29 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000030 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000031
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000032- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
33 now encodes backslash correctly.
34
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000035- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
36
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000037- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
38 and long longs.
39
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000040- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
41 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
42 message in this case.
43
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000044- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
45 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
46 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
47 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
48 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
49
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000050- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000051
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000052- Speed up some Unicode operations.
53
54- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
55
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000056- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000057 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
58
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000059- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
60
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000061- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
62 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
63
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000064- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
65
66- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
67
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000068- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
69 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
70 was empty.
71
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000072- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
73 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
74
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000075- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000076 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000077
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000078- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
79 codes.
80
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000081- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
82 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
83 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
84
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000085- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
86 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
87
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000088- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000089 (fixes bug #1119418).
90
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000091- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
92
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000093- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
94 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
95
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000096- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
97 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
98 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
99
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000100- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
101
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000102- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
103 reference counts in some error exit cases.
104
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000105- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
106 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
107 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
108 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
109 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
110 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
111 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
112 realloc.
113
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000114- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
115 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
116
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000117- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
118 like their int counterparts.
119
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000120- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
121 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
122 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
123 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
124 for a longer write-up of the problem).
125
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000126- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
127 serializing floats.
128
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000129- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
130 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
131 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
132
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000133- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
134 278.
135
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000136- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
137 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
138 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
139 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000140 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000141 PyNumber_*().
142 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
143
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000144- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
145 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
146 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
147 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
148
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000149- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
150 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
151 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
152 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
153 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
154
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000155- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
156 disabled caused a crash.
157
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000158- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
159 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
160
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000161- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000162 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
163
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000164- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
165
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000166- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000167 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
168 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
169 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000170
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000171- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
172
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000173- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
174 returning None.
175
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000176- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000177 ('\') with a specific error message.
178
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000179- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
180
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000181- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
182 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
183
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000184- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000185 an ferror() call.
186
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000187- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
188 list.sort().
189
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000190- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
191 (2+3) --> (5).
192
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000193- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
194
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000195- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
196 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000197
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000198- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
199 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
200 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
201
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000202- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
203 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
204 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
205
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000206Extension Modules
207-----------------
208
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000209- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
210
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000211- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
212 problem on AIX.
213
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000214- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
215
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000216- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
217
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000218- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
219
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000220- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
221 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
222
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000223- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
224
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000225- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
226 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
227
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000228- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
229
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000230- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
231 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
232
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000233- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
234 returns in cStringIO.c.
235
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000236- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
237 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
238
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000239- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
240
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000241- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
242
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000243- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
244 the file system encoding.
245
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000246- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
247 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000248
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000249- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
250
251- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000252 line without newlines.
253
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000254- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
255 on Windows.
256
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000257- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000258 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
259
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000260- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
261 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
262 for large or negative values.
263
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000264- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000265 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000266
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000267- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
268
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000269- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
270 if available on the platform.
271
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000272- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
273 available on the platform.
274
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000275- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
276 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
277
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000278- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
279
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000280- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
281 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
282 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
283
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000284- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
285
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000286- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
287 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
288
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000289- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000290 file size.
291
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000292- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
293
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000294- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
295 {remove_history,replace_history}
296
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000297- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
298 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000299
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000300- stat_float_times is now True.
301
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000302- array.array objects are now picklable.
303
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000304- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
305 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
306
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000307- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
308 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
309 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
310
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000311- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
312 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000313
314Library
315-------
316
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000317- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000318 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
319 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
320 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
321 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
322
323 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
324 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
325 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
326 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
327 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000328
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000329- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
330 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
331 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
332
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000333- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
334
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000335- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
336
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000337- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
338 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
339 illegal argument)
340
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000341- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
342 is an error in the format string.
343
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000344- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
345
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000346- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000347 "parent" argument.
348
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000349- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
350 for padding.
351
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000352- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
353 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
354
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000355- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
356 to get the correct encoding.
357
358- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
359 languages.
360
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000361- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
362
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000363- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
364
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000365- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
366
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000367- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
368 functionality.
369
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000370- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
371
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000372- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
373 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
374
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000375- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
376 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
377 match the Content-Length header.
378
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000379- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
380
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000381- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
382 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000383 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000384
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000385- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
386
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000387- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
388
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000389- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
390 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
391
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000392- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
393 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
394 Tkdnd.
395
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000396- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
397 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
398
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000399- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
400 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
401
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000402- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000403 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
404
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000405- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
406 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
407
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000408- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
409 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
410
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000411- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000412 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000413
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000414- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
415
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000416- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
417 error messages.
418
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000419- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
420
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000421- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
422 Bug #1224621.
423
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000424- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
425 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
426 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
427 terminates by raising StopIteration.
428
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000429- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
430
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000431- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
432 component of the path.
433
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000434- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
435 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
436 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
437 class at all.
438
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000439- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
440 files to PyPI.
441
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000442- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
443 them to PyPI.
444
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000445- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
446 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
447 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
448 work as expected.
449
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000450- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
451 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
452
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000453- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000454 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
455
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000456- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
457
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000458- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
459 to build.
460
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000461- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
462 symbolic links on Windows.
463
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000464- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000465 profile.py if available.
466
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000467- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
468
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000469- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
470 in LWPCookieJar.
471
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000472- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
473
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000474- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
475
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000476- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
477
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000478- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
479
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000480- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
481
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000482- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
483
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000484- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
485
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000486- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
487
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000488- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
489 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
490 be exploited in various ways.
491
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000492- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000493 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
494
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000495- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
496 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
497
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000498- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000499 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
500
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000501- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
502
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000503- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
504
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000505- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
506
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000507- Enhancements to the csv module:
508
509 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000510 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000511 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000512 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
513 reporting.
514 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
515 dictates.
516 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000517 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000518 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000519 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
520 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000521 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
522 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000523 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000524 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
525 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
526 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
527 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
528 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
529 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
530 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
531 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
532 without first creating a dialect class.
533 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
534 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
535 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000536 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000537 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
538 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000539 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
540 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
541 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
542 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000543 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
544 This has been fixed.
545
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000546- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
547 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
548 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
549 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
550
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000551- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
552
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000553- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
554 (Bug #951915).
555
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000556- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
557 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
558 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000559 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000560
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000561- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
562
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000563- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
564 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
565
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000566- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
567
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000568- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
569
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000570- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
571
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000572- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
573
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000574- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
575
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000576- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
577 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
578 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
579
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000580- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000581 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000582
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000583- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
584 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
585 tokenizer with very long source lines.
586
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000587- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
588 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
589
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000590- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
591 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000592
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000593- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
594 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
595
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000596- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
597 correctly.
598
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000599- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
600 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
601 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
602 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
603 between two lines.
604
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000605- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
606 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
607 handlers.
608
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000609- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000610 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
611 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000612
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000613- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
614 considering it exactly like a '*'.
615
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000616- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
617 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000618
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000619- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
620
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000621Build
622-----
623
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000624- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
625 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
626
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000627- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
628 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
629
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000630- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
631 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
632 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000633 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000634
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000635- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
636 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
637 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
638
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000639- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
640
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000641- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
642 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
643
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000644- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
645 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
646 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
647 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
648 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
649 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
650 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
651 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
652
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000653- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
654 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
655 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
656 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
657
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000658
659C API
660-----
661
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000662- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
663
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000664- Removed PyRange_New().
665
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000666- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
667 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
668 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
669 mappings.
670
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000671
672Tests
673-----
674
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000675- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000676
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000677- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
678 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
679
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000680
681Documentation
682-------------
683
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000684- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
685
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000686- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
687
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000688- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
689
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000690- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
691
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000692- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
693
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000694- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
695
696- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
697
698- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
699
700- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
701
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000702- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
703 Closes bug #1166582.
704
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000705- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
706 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
707 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
708
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000709Mac
710---
711
712
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000713New platforms
714-------------
715
716- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
717
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000718
719Tools/Demos
720-----------
721
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000722- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
723 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
724 source files that need an encoding declaration.
725 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
726
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000727- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
728
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000729- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000730
731
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000732What's New in Python 2.4 final?
733===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000734
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000735*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000736
737Core and builtins
738-----------------
739
740- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
741 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
742 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
743
744
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000745What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
746==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000747
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000748*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000749
750Core and builtins
751-----------------
752
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000753- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
754 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
755 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
756
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000757
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000758Library
759-------
760
761- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
762 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
763 raised is re-raised.
764
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000765- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
766 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
767
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000768- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
769 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
770 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
771 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
772 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
773 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
774 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
775 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
776 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
777 by the slice are recomputed now.
778
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000779- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000780
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000781Build
782-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000783
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000784- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
785 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
786 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000787
788C API
789-----
790
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000791- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
792
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000793
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000794What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
795================================
796
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000797*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000798
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000799License
800-------
801
802The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
803is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
804changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
805Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
806intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
807durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
808the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
809License::
810
811 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
812
813says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
814to Python 2.1.1.
815
816The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
817License Version 2.
818
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000819Core and builtins
820-----------------
821
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000822- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
823 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
824 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
825 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
826 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
827 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
828 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000829 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000830 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
831 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
832
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000833- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000834
835Extension Modules
836-----------------
837
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000838- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
839 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
840 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
841 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000842
843Library
844-------
845
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000846- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
847 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
848 returned.
849
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000850- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
851
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000852- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
853 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
854
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000855- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
856
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000857- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
858 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000859
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000860- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
861
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000862- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
863
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000864- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000865 the source code is updated and reloaded.
866
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000867Build
868-----
869
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000870- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000871
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000872What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
873================================
874
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000875*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000876
877Core and builtins
878-----------------
879
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000880- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000881 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
882
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000883- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
884 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
885 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
886 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
887
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000888- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
889 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
890
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000891- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
892 constant.
893
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000894- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
895 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
896 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
897 large), and to anomalies such as
898 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
899 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
900 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
901 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000902
903Extension modules
904-----------------
905
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000906- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
907 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000908 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
909 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
910 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000911
912Library
913-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000914
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000915- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000916 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000917 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
918 --swig-cpp.
919
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000920- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
921 it is set.
922
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000923- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000924
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000925- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
926 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
927 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
928 Closes bug #1039270.
929
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000930- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000931
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000932 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000933 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
934 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
935 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
936 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
937 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
938 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
939 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
940 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
941 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
942 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
943 + Updates to documentation.
944
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000945- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
946 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
947 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
948 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
949
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000950- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000951
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000952- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
953 applications should use the getmember function.
954
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000955- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
956
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000957- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
958 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
959 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
960 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
961 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
962 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
963 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
964 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
965 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
966
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000967- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
968 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000969 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000970
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000971- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
972 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
973 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
974 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
975 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
976 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
977 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
978 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000979
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000980- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
981 the new public features (of which there are many).
982
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000983- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000984 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
985 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
986 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
987 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000988 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000989
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000990- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
991
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000992- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
993 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
994 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
995 options.
996
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000997- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
998 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
999 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1000 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1001 conditions under which non-string values work.
1002
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001003Build
1004-----
1005
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001006- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1007 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1008 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1009
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001010- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1011 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1012 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1013 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1014 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001015
1016C API
1017-----
1018
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001019- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1020 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1021
1022- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1023
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001024- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1025 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1026 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1027 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1028 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1029 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1030 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1031 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1032 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1033
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001034- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1035
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001036- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1037 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1038 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001039
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001040Tests
1041-----
1042
1043- test__locale ported to unittest
1044
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001045Mac
1046---
1047
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001048- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1049 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1050 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001051
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001052Tools/Demos
1053-----------
1054
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001055- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1056 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1057 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1058 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1059 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001060
1061
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001062What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1063=================================
1064
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001065*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001066
1067Core and builtins
1068-----------------
1069
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001070- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001071 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1072
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001073- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1074 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1075 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1076 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1077 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1078 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1079 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1080 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001081 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1082 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1083 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1084 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1085 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001086
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001087- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1088 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1089 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1090 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1091 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1092
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001093- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1094
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001095- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1096 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1097
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001098- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1099 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1100 modified the list.
1101
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001102- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1103 functions is now writable.
1104
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001105- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1106 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1107 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1108 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1109
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001110- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1111 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1112 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1113 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1114 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001115
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001116- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1117 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1118
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001119Extension modules
1120-----------------
1121
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001122- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1123
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001124- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1125 data.
1126
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001127- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1128 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1129 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1130 supposed to have been truncated away.
1131
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001132- Added socket.socketpair().
1133
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001134- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1135 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1136
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001137- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001138 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1139
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001140Library
1141-------
1142
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001143- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001144 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001145
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001146- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1147 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1148
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001149- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1150 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1151
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001152- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1153
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001154- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1155 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001156
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001157- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1158 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1159
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001160- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1161
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001162- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1163
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001164- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1165
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001166- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1167 Percivall.
1168
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001169- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1170 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1171
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001172- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1173 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1174 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001175 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001176
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001177- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1178 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1179 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1180 and exponent.
1181
1182- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1183
1184- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001185 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001186 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1187
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001188- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1189 to the readline module.
1190
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001191- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001192 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1193 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001194
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001195- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1196 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1197 contains symlinks.
1198
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001199- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1200 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1201
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001202- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1203 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1204 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1205
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001206- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1207 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1208 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1209 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1210 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1211 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1212 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1213 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1214 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1215 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1216 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1217 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1218 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1219
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001220- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1221
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001222Tools/Demos
1223-----------
1224
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001225- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1226 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1227
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001228- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1229
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001230Build
1231-----
1232
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001233- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1234 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1235 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1236 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1237 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1238 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1239 plans to do so.
1240
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001241- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1242 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1243
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001244- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1245 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1246
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001247- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1248 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1249
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001250- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1251 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1252
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001253- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1254 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1255
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001256C API
1257-----
1258
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001259..
1260
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001261Documentation
1262-------------
1263
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001264- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1265 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1266
1267- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1268 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1269 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001270
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001271New platforms
1272-------------
1273
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001274- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1275
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001276Tests
1277-----
1278
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001279..
1280
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001281Windows
1282-------
1283
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001284- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1285 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1286 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1287 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1288 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1289 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1290 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1291 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1292 the problem.
1293
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001294Mac
1295---
1296
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001297..
1298
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001299
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001300What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1301=================================
1302
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001303*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001304
1305Core and builtins
1306-----------------
1307
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001308- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1309 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1310 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1311 sensitive code.
1312
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001313- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001314 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001315
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001316 @staticmethod
1317 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001318
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001319 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001320
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001321- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1322 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1323 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1324 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1325 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1326 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1327 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1328 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1329 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1330 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1331 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1332
1333 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1334 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1335 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1336 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1337 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1338 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1339 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1340
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001341- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1342 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1343
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001344- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001345 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001346
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001347- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001348 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001349 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1350
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001351- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001352 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1353 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1354
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001355- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1356 types that support garbage collection.
1357
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001358- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1359
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001360- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1361 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1362 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1363 Jython.
1364
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001365- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1366
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001367- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1368 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1369
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001370- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1371 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1372 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001373
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001374- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1375 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1376 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1377
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001378Extension modules
1379-----------------
1380
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001381- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1382
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001383Library
1384-------
1385
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001386- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1387 TIS-620
1388
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001389- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1390 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1391 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1392 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1393 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1394 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1395 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1396 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1397 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1398 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1399
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001400- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1401
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001402- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1403 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1404 same as when the argument is omitted).
1405 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1406
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001407- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1408
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001409- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1410 schemes are offered.
1411
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001412- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1413
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001414- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1415 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1416 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1417
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001418- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1419
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001420- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1421 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1422
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001423- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1424 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1425 when dummy_threading is being used.
1426
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001427- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1428 from a tarfile.
1429
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001430- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001431 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001432
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001433- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1434 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1435 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1436 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1437
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001438- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1439 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1440
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001441- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1442 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1443 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1444 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1445 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1446 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1447 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1448 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1449 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1450 by some other method in progress).
1451
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001452- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1453 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1454 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001455
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001456- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1457
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001458- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1459 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1460 AM Kuchling.
1461
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001462- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1463 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1464 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1465
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001466- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1467 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1468 instead of unsigned.
1469
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001470- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001471 no longer part of the public API.
1472
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001473- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1474 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1475 string methods of the same name).
1476
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001477- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001478 SF patch 945642.
1479
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001480- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1481
1482 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1483
1484 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1485 DocTestSuites.
1486
1487- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1488 that provide thread-local data.
1489
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001490- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1491 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1492
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001493- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1494
1495- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1496 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1497 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1498
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001499- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1500
1501 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1502 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1503 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001504
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001505 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1506 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1507 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1508 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1509
1510 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1511 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1512
1513 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1514 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1515 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1516 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1517
1518 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1519 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1520 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1521 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1522 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1523
1524 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1525 wrapping help output.
1526
1527 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1528 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1529 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001530
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001531C API
1532-----
1533
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001534- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1535 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1536 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1537 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1538 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1539 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1540 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1541 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1542 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1543 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1544 its visible semantics have not changed.
1545
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001546- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1547 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1548
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001549Documentation
1550-------------
1551
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001552- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001553
1554 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001555 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001556
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001557 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001558
1559 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1560
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001561- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001562
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001563Tests
1564-----
1565
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001566- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001567 platforms that use the Makefile.
1568
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001569- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1570 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1571 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1572
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001573
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001574What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1575=================================
1576
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001577*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001578
1579Core and builtins
1580-----------------
1581
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001582- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1583 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1584 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1585 objects now (one object instead of three).
1586
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001587- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1588 Windows DLLs.
1589
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001590- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1591 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001592
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001593- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1594 a new .pyc magic.
1595
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001596- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1597 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1598 be there.
1599
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001600- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1601 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1602 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1603
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001604- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1605 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1606 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1607
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001608- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1609
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001610- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1611 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1612 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001613
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001614- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1615 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1616
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001617- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1618
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001619- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001620 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001621
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001622- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1623
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001624- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1625
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001626- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1627 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1628
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001629- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1630 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1631 Fixes bug #858016 .
1632
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001633- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1634 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1635 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1636
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001637- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1638 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1639 improves their performance (about 35%).
1640
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001641- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1642 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1643 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1644
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001645- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1646 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1647 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1648 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1649
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001650- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1651 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001652 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001653 length is not known).
1654
1655- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1656 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001657 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1658 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001659 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1660
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001661- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1662 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1663
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001664- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1665 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1666 keyword arguments.
1667
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001668- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1669 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1670 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1671
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001672- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1673 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1674 cases.
1675
1676- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1677 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1678 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1679 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1680 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1681 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1682 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1683 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1684 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1685 a release build.
1686
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001687- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1688 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1689
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001690- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001691 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001692
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001693- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1694 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1695 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1696 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1697 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1698 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1699 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1700 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1701 destroyed.
1702
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001703- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1704 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1705 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1706 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1707 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1708 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1709 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1710 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1711
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001712- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1713 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1714 character other than a space.
1715
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001716- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1717 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1718 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1719 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1720 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1721 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1722 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1723 attributes with the same name.
1724
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001725- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1726 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1727 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1728 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1729 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1730 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1731 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1732 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1733 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1734 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1735 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1736 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1737 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1738 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001739
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001740- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1741 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1742 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1743 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1744 This has been repaired.
1745
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001746- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1747
1748- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1749
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001750- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1751 over a sequence.
1752
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001753- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001754 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001755
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001756- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1757
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001758- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1759 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1760 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1761 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1762 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1763 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1764 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1765 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1766
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001767- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1768 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1769 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1770
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001771- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1772 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1773 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1774 freelist.
1775
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001776- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1777 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1778
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001779- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1780 number.
1781
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001782- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1783 a TypeError exception.
1784
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001785- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1786 820195.
1787
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001788- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1789 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1790 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1791
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001792- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001793 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1794 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001795
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001796- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1797 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1798 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1799
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001800- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1801 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001802 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001803
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001804- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001805 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1806 the first call.
1807
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001808
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001809Extension modules
1810-----------------
1811
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001812- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1813 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1814
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001815- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1816 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1817 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1818 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1819 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1820 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1821 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001822
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001823- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1824
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001825- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1826
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001827- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1828 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1829
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001830- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1831 fewer false positives.
1832
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001833- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1834 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1835
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001836- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001837 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1838
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001839- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001840 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001841 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001842 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1843 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001844
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001845- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1846 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1847 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1848 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1849
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001850- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1851 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1852 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1853 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1854 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1855 #897625.
1856
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001857- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1858 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1859
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001860- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1861 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1862 and pops on either side of the deque.
1863
1864- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1865 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1866
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001867- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1868 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1869 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1870 other functions that expect a function argument.
1871
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001872- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1873
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001874- os.getsid was added.
1875
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001876- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1877 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1878 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1879
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001880- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1881
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001882- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1883
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001884- readline.clear_history was added.
1885
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001886- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1887
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001888- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1889
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001890- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1891
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001892- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1893
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001894- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1895
1896- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1897
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001898- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1899
1900- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1901
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001902- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1903 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1904 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1905
1906- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1907 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1908 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1909 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1910 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1911 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1912 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1913
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001914- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1915 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1916 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1917 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001918
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001919- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001920 iterators from a single iterable.
1921
1922- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1923 of raising a TypeError exception.
1924
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001925- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1926 as parameter.
1927
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001928Library
1929-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001930
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001931- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1932
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001933- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1934 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1935 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001936
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001937- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1938 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1939 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001940
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001941- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001942
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001943- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1944 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001945
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001946- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1947 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1948
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001949- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1950
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001951- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001952 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001953
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001954- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001955 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001956
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001957- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1958
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001959- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1960 on cygwin and mingw32.
1961
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001962- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1963
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001964- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1965 module.
1966
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001967- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1968 installation scheme for all platforms.
1969
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001970- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001971 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001972
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001973- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1974 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1975 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1976
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001977- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1978 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1979 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1980
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001981- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1982
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001983- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1984
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001985- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1986 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1987
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001988- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1989 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1990 type pattern with the same value exists.
1991
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001992- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1993 when run from the command prompt).
1994
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001995- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1996 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1997
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001998- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1999 default sort).
2000
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002001- Added global runctx function to profile module
2002
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002003- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2004
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002005- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2006
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002007- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2008
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002009- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002010 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2011 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2012 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2013 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2014 accordingly.
2015
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002016- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2017 decoding standards.
2018
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002019- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2020 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2021 called for all requests.
2022
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002023- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2024 they are passed to the compiler.
2025
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002026- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2027 indent, width and depth.
2028
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002029- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2030 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2031
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002032- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2033 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2034
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002035- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2036
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002037- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2038
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002039- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2040
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002041- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2042 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2043
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002044- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002045 for better performance.
2046
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002047- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002048
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002049- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2050 a string).
2051
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002052- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2053
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002054- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2055
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002056- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2057
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002058- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2059
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002060- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2061 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2062 list of fieldnames.
2063
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002064- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2065 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2066
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002067- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2068
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002069- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2070 empty lists.
2071
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002072- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2073 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2074 and shelves.
2075
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002076- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2077 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2078
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002079- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002080 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2081 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002082
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002083- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2084 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002085 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002086
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002087- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002088 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2089 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2090
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002091- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2092 and removed in Py2.4.
2093
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002094- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2095
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002096- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2097
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002098Tools/Demos
2099-----------
2100
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002101- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2102 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2103
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002104- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2105
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002106- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2107 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2108 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2109 destination in situations where both files are given.
2110
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002111- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2112 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2113 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2114 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2115
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002116- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2117
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002118- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2119 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2120 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2121 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2122 now.
2123
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002124- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2125 in effect
2126
2127- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2128 C-c C-h
2129
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002130- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2131 -d option was given.
2132
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002133Build
2134-----
2135
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002136- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2137 build under OS X.
2138
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002139- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2140 --enable-profiling.
2141
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002142- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2143 is configured --with-tsc.
2144
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002145- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2146 on AMD64.
2147
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002148- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2149 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2150
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002151- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2152 removed.
2153
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002154- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2155 supported (see PEP 11).
2156
2157- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2158
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002159- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2160
2161- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2162 (see PEP 11).
2163
2164- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2165 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2166
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002167C API
2168-----
2169
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002170- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2171 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2172 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2173
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002174- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2175 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2176 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2177 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2178
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002179- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2180 generator objects.
2181
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002182- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2183 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002184 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2185 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002186
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002187- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2188 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2189
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002190- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2191 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2192 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2193 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2194 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2195
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002196- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2197 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2198 about 10% faster.
2199
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002200- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2201 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2202
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002203- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2204 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2205 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2206 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2207
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002208Windows
2209-------
2210
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002211- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2212 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2213 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2214 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2215
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002216- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2217 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2218 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2219
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002220
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002221What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2222===============================
2223
2224*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2225
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002226IDLE
2227----
2228
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002229- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2230 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2231 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2232 context-menu actions.
2233
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002234- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2235 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2236 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2237 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2238 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2239 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2240 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2241 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2242 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2243
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002244
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002245What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2246=============================================
2247
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002248*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002249
2250Core and builtins
2251-----------------
2252
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002253- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002254 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002255 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2256
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002257Extension modules
2258-----------------
2259
2260- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2261 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2262 than once. This has been fixed.
2263
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002264- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2265 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2266 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2267 call.
2268
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002269- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2270
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002271Library
2272-------
2273
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002274- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2275 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2276
2277- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2278 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2279 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2280 restored.
2281
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002282IDLE
2283----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002284
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002285- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002286
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002287Build
2288-----
2289
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002290- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2291 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2292
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002293C API
2294-----
2295
2296Windows
2297-------
2298
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002299- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2300 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2301
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002302- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2303
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002304Mac
2305---
2306
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002307- Various fixes to pimp.
2308
2309- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2310
2311- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2312 more problems than it solves.
2313
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002314
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002315What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2316=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002317
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002318*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2319
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002320Core and builtins
2321-----------------
2322
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002323- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2324 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2325
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002326- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2327 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002328 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329
2330- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2331 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2332 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002333 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002334
2335- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2336 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002337
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002338- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2339 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2340 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2341
2342- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002343 770247.
2344
2345- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002346
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002347Extension modules
2348-----------------
2349
2350- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2351 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2352
2353- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2354
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002355- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2356
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002357- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2358 contained within the _strptime module.
2359
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002360- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2361 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2362
2363- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002364 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2365
2366- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2367 the find_class attribute, if present.
2368
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002369- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002370
2371 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2372 (SF bug 763298).
2373
2374 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002375 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2376 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2377 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002378
2379 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2380
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002381Library
2382-------
2383
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002384- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2385
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002386- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2387 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2388 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2389 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2390 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2391 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2392 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2393 or Tester().
2394
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002395- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2396 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2397 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2398 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2399 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2400 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2401 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2402 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2403 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002404
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002405 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002406
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002407- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2408 weren't before was an oversight.
2409
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002410- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2411 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2412
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002413- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2414 when there are no lines.
2415
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002416- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2417 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2418
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002419- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2420 to child processes.
2421
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002422- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2423
2424- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2425
2426- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2427 xmlrpclib.
2428
2429- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2430 responses.
2431
2432- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2433 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2434
2435- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2436 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2437 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2438
2439- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2440 used as patterns.
2441
2442- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2443 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2444 than Tk 8.3.
2445
2446- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2447
2448- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002449
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002450Tools/Demos
2451-----------
2452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002453- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2454
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002455- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2456
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002457- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002458
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002459Build
2460-----
2461
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002462- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2463
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002464- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2465
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002466- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2467 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002468
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002469- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2470 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2471 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002472
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002473C API
2474-----
2475
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002476- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2477 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2478
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002479Windows
2480-------
2481
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002482- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2483 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2484 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2485 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2486 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2487 Python exception ::
2488
2489 thread.error: can't start new thread
2490
2491 is raised now.
2492
2493- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2494 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2495 instead of from DLL teardown.
2496
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002497Mac
2498---
2499
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002500- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002501 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002502 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2503 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2504 the executable in the bundle.
2505
2506- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002507
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002508- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2509
2510- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2511 on Panther.
2512
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002513What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2514================================
2515
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002516*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002517
2518Core and builtins
2519-----------------
2520
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002521- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2522 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2523 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2524 with the -i option.
2525
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002526- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2527 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2528
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002529- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2530 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2531
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002532- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2533 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2534 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2535 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2536 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2537 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2538 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2539 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2540 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2541 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2542 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2543 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2544 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002545
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002546- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2547 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2548 embedded in a lambda expression.
2549
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002550- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2551 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2552 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2553 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2554 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2555
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002556- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2557 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2558 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2559
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002560- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2561 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2562
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002563- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2564 It's writable again.
2565
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002566- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2567 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2568 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002569 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002570
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002571- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2572 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2573 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2574
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002575Extension modules
2576-----------------
2577
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002578- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2579 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2580
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002581- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2582 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2583 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2584 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2585
2586- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2587 collection.
2588
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002589- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2590 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2591 unique within a single program run.
2592
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002593- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2594 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2595
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002596- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2597 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2598
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002599- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2600 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002601
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002602- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2603
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002604- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2605 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2606
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002607- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2608 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2609 for many BSD-derived systems.
2610
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002611
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002612Library
2613-------
2614
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002615- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2616 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2617 primary ones:
2618
2619 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2620 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2621 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2622
2623 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2624 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2625 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2626 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2627 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2628 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2629
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002630- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2631 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2632 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2633 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2634 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2635 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2636 argument.
2637
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002638- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2639 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2640 in the archive.
2641
2642- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2643 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2644
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002645- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2646 569574).
2647
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002648- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2649 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2650 no more.
2651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002652- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2653 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2654 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2655 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2656 code coverage.
2657
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002658- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2659 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2660 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002661 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2662 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002663
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002664- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2665 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2666 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002667 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002668
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002669- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2670
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002671- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2672 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2673 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2674 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2675
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002676- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2677 handling.
2678
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002679- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2680 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2681
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002682- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2683 in socket.py.
2684
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002685- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2686
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002687- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2688 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2689 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2690 opener with proxy support.
2691
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002692- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2693
2694- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2695
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002696Tools/Demos
2697-----------
2698
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002699- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2700
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002701- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2702
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002703- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2704 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002705
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002706- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2707 files.
2708
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002709Build
2710-----
2711
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002712- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002713 different root directory.
2714
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002715C API
2716-----
2717
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002718- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2719 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2720 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2721 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2722 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2723 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2724 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2725 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2726 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2727 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2728
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002729- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2730 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2731 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2732 from Python.
2733
2734
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002735New platforms
2736-------------
2737
2738None this time.
2739
2740Tests
2741-----
2742
2743- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2744 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2745
2746Windows
2747-------
2748
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002749- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2750
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002751- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2752 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2753 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2754 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2755 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2756 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2757 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2758 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2759 that's what it's for.
2760
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002761Mac
2762---
2763
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002764- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2765 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2766 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2767 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002768- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2769 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2770- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002771
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002772SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2773------------------------------------
2774
2775430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2776598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2777622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2778661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2779683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2780697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2781713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2782724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2783727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2784729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2785730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2786731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2787732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2788733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2789735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2790740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2791744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2792745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2793747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2794749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2795751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2796753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2797755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2798757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2799760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2800
2801
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002802What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2803================================
2804
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002805*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002806
2807Core and builtins
2808-----------------
2809
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002810- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2811 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2812
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002813- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2814 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2815 and cannot be strings).
2816
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002817- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2818 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2819 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2820 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2821
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002822- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2823 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2824 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2825 Python itself.
2826
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002827- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2828 the referenced object, if it has one.
2829
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002830- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2831 the thread started at
2832 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2833
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002834- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2835 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2836 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2837 placed on a list index.
2838
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002839- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2840 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2841 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2842 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2843
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002844- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2845 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2846 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2847 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2848 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2849 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2850 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2851
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002852- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2853 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2854 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2855 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2856 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2857
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002858- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2859 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002860
2861- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2862 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2863 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2864 #693195.)
2865
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002866- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2867 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002868
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002869- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002870 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002871 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2872 interpreter executions, would fail.
2873
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002874- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002875 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002876 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002877
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002878Extension modules
2879-----------------
2880
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002881- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2882 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2883 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2884 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2885
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002886- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2887 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2888
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002889- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2890 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2891 and Greg Chapman.)
2892
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002893- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2894 recursively.
2895
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002896- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002897 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2898 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2899 leaks.
2900
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002901- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2902
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002903- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2904 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2905 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2906 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2907 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2908 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2909 #705836.
2910
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002911- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002912 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2913
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002914- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2915 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2916 See SF bug #692416.
2917
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002918- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2919 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2920
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002921- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2922 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2923 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002924
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002925- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002926 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2927 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2928
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002929- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2930 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2931 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2932 timeouts to work properly.
2933
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002934Library
2935-------
2936
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002937- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2938 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2939 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2940 future release.
2941
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002942- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2943 for querying platform dependent features.
2944
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002945- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002947- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2948 pickle protocol versions.
2949
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002950- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2951 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2952 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2953
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002954- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2955
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002956- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2957 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2958 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2959 modules.
2960
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002961- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2962 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2963 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2964
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002965- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2966 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2967
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002968- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2969 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2970 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2971
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002972- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002973 MS Office extensions.
2974
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002975- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2976 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2977
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002978- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2979 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2980
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002981- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2982 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2983 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2984 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2985 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2986 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2987
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002988- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2989 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2990 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002991
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002992- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2993 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2994 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2995
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002996- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2997
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002998- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2999 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3000 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3001
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003002Tools/Demos
3003-----------
3004
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003005- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3006 See the module docstring for details.
3007
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003008Build
3009-----
3010
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003011- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3012 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003013
3014C API
3015-----
3016
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003017- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3018
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003019- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3020 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3021 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3022
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003023- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3024 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003025
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003026 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3027 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3028 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003029
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003030- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003031 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3032
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003033- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3034 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3035 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003036
3037New platforms
3038-------------
3039
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003040None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003041
3042Tests
3043-----
3044
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003045- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3046 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003047
3048Windows
3049-------
3050
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003051- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3052 function.
3053
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003054- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3055 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003056
3057Mac
3058---
3059
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003060- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3061 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003062
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003063- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3064 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003065
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003066- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3067 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3068 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003069
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003070- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003071 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3072 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003073
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003074- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3075 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003076
3077
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003078What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3079=================================
3080
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003081*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003082
3083Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003084-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003085
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003086- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3087 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3088 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3089
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003090- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3091 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3092 (SF patch #664376.)
3093
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003094- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3095 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3096 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3097 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3098 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3099 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003100 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003101
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003102- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3103 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3104 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3105 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003106 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003107
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003108- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3109 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3110 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3111 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3112 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3113 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3114 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3115 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3116 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3117 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3118 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3119
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003120- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3121 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3122 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3123 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3124 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3125 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3126
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003127- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3128 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3129
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003130- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3131 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3132 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3133 case.)
3134
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003135- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3136 passed as unicode strings.
3137
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003138- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3139 See SF bug #683467.
3140
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003141- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3142 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3143
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003144- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3145
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003146- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3147
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003148- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3149 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3150 arguments.
3151
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003152- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3153 See SF bug #667147.
3154
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003155- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003156 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003157 See SF bug #676155.
3158
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003159- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003160 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003161 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3162 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3163 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3164 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3165 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3166 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003167
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003168Extension modules
3169-----------------
3170
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003171- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3172 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3173 tp_as_number pointer.
3174
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003175- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3176 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3177 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3178 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3179 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3180
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003181- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3182
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003183- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3184
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003185- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003186 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003187 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3188 patch #678531.)
3189
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003190- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3191 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3192
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003193- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3194 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3195
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003196- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3197
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003198- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3199 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3200 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3201
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003202- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3203
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003204- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3205 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3206
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003207- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003208
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003209- datetime changes:
3210
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003211 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3212
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003213 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3214 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3215 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3216 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3217 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3218 now.
3219
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003220 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003221 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3222 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003223
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003224 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003225 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003226 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3227 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3228 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3229 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003230
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003231 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3232 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3233 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003234 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3235
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003236 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3237 by a later example coded by Guido.
3238
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003239 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003240 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3241 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3242 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003243 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3244 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3245
3246 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3247 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3248 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3249 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3250 tzinfo subclass instance.
3251
3252 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3253 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3254 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3255 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3256 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3257 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3258 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3259 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003260
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003261 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3262 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3263 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3264 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3265 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003266 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3267
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003268 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003269
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003270 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3271 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3272 as a naive datetime object.
3273
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003274 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3275 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3276 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3277
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003278 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3279 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3280 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3281 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3282 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3283 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3284 comparison.
3285
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003286 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3287 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3288 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3289 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003290 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003291
3292 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003293
3294 and ::
3295
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003296 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3297
3298 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3299 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3300 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3301 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3302
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003303 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3304 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3305 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3306 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3307 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3308
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003309 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3310 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003311 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3312 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003313
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003314Library
3315-------
3316
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003317- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3318 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3319
3320- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3321 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3322 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3323 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3324 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3325 See PEP 307 for details.
3326
3327- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3328 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3329
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003330- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3331 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003332 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003333 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3334 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003335 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003336
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003337- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3338 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3339
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003340- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3341 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3342 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3343
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003344- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3345
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003346- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3347 exception.
3348
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003349- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3350 class.
3351
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003352- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3353 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3354 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3355
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003356- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3357 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3358
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003359- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003360 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3361 See SF bug #659228.
3362
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003363- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3364 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3365 See SF patch #651082.
3366
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003367- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003368
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003369- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3370 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3371
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003372- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003373 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003374
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003375- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3376 DOS paths from other platforms.
3377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003378Tools/Demos
3379-----------
3380
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003381- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3382 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3383 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3384 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3385 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3386 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3387 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3388 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3389 example:
3390
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003391 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3392 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003393
3394 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3395
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003397Build
3398-----
3399
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003400- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3401 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3402 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003403 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3404
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003405 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3406
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003407- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3408 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3409 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3410 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3411 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3412 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3413 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3414 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3415 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3416
3417- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3418 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3419 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3420 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3421
3422- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3423 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3424
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003425C API
3426-----
3427
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003428- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3429 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003430
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003431- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3432 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3433 tp_as_number pointer.
3434
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003435- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3436 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3437 (SF #681367)
3438
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003439- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3440 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3441 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3442 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003443
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003444Tests
3445-----
3446
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003447- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003448 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3449 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3450 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3451 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3452 pydoc.)
3453
3454- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3455
3456- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003457
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003458Windows
3459-------
3460
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003461- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3462 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3463 time).
3464
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003465- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3466 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3467
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003468- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3469 release without strong cryptography.
3470
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003471- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003472 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003473
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003474- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3475 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003477Mac
3478---
3479
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003480- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3481 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003482
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003483- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3484 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3485 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003486
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003487- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3488 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003489
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003490- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3491 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3492 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3493 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003494
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003495- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003496 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3497 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3498 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003501What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502=================================
3503
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003504*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003506Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003508
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003509- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3510
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003511- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3512 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003513 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003514 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003515 a different meaning than before.
3516
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003517- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003518 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003519 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003520
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003521- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003522 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003523 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003524
3525- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3526 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3527 and deallocation.
3528
3529- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3530 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3531
3532- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3533 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3534 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3535 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3536 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3537
3538- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3539 now detected by the garbage collector.
3540
3541- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3542 [SF bug 519621]
3543
3544- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3545 identifier.
3546
3547- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3548 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3549 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3550 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3551 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3552 [SF bug 563060]
3553
3554- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3555 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3556 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3557 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3558 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3559
3560- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3561 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3562 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3563
3564- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3565
3566- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3567 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3568 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3569 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3570 state of the slots would be lost.)
3571
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003572Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003574
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003575- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003576 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3577 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3578 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3579 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003580 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3581 Jython 2.1.
3582
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003583- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003584 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003585 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3586 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3587 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3588 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3589 these, see PEP 302.
3590
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003591- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3592 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3593 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3594
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003595- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3596 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3597 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3598
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003599- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3600 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3601 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3602
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003603- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3604 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3605 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3606 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3607 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3608 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3609 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3610 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3611 releases or implementations.
3612
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003613- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003614 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3615 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003616
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003617- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3618 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3619
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003620- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3621 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3622 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3623
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003624- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3625 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3626
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003627- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3628 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003629 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3630 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003631
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003632- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3633 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3634 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3635 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3636 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3637
3638 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3639 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3640 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3641 pattern.
3642
3643 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3644 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3645 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3646 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3647
3648 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3649 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3650 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3651 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3652 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3653 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3654
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003655- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3656 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3657 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3658 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3659 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3660 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3661 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3662 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003663
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003664- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3665 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3666 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3667 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3668 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003669 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3670 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3671 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3672 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3673 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3674 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3675 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003676
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003677- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3678 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3679
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003680- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3681 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3682 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3683 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3684 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3685 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3686 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3687 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3688 to Zack Weinberg!
3689
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003690- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3691 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3692 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3693 type. This has been fixed now.
3694
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003695- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3696 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3697 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3698
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003699- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3700 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3701 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3702 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3703 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3704 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3705 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3706 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003707 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003708
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003709- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3710 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3711 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003712
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003713- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3714 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3715 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3716 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3717 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3718 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3719 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3720 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003721 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003722 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3723 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3724
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003725- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3726 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3727 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3728 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3729 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3730 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3731 this.)
3732
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003733- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3734 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003735 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003736 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003737 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3738 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003739 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3740 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003741
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003742- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3743 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3744 currently running.
3745
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003746- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3747 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3748 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3749 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3750
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003751- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3752 as directory names.
3753
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003754- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3755 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3756
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003757- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3758 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3759
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003760- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003761 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3762 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003763
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003764- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3765 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3766 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3767 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3768 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3769
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003770- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3771 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3772 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3773 removed.
3774
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003775- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3776 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3777 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3778
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003779- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3780 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3781 to __debug__.
3782
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003783- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3784 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3785 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3786
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003787- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3788 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3789 deprecated now.
3790
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003791- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3792 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3793 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003794
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003795- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3796 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3797 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3798 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3799 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003800
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003801- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3802 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3803
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003804- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3805 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3806 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003807 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003808 is backward compatible.
3809
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003810- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3811 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3812 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3813 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3814 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3815
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003816- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3817 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3818 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3819 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3820 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3821 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003822
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003823- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3824 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3825
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003826- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3827 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3828
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003829- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3830 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3831 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3832 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3833 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3834
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003835- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3836 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3837 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3838
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003839- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003840 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3841
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003842- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3843 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3844 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003845
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003846- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3847 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3848
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003849- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3850 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3851 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3852
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003853- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003855Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003857
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003858- Added three operators to the operator module:
3859 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3860 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3861 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3862
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003863- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3864
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003865- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3866 archives.
3867
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003868- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3869 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3870 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3871
3872 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3873
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003874- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3875 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3876 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003877 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003878
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003879- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3880 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3881 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3882 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003883 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3884 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3885 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3886 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003887
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003888- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3889 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003890
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003891- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3892
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003893- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3894 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3895
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003896- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3897 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3898 supported.
3899
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003900- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3901
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003902- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3903 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003904
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003905- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3906 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3907
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003908- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3909
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003910- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3911 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3912
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003913- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3914 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3915 functions but callable type objects.
3916
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003917- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003918 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003919 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003920
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003921- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3922 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003923
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003924- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3925 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003926
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003927- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3928 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3929 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3930 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3931
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003932- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3933 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003934
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003935- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3936 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3937 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3938 and __imul__.
3939
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003940- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003941 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3942 is called.
3943
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003944- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3945 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3946 interpreter was compiled.
3947
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003948- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3949 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3950 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003951 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003952 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3953 1, not 2.
3954
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003955- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3956 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3957 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3958 limit.
3959
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003960- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3961 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3962 bug #623464.
3963
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003964- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3965 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3966 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3967 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3968
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003969Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003971
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003972- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3973
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003974- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3975 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3976 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3977 with Python 2.3a2.
3978
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003979- os.path exposes getctime.
3980
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003981- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003982 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003983 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003984 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003985 unit tests of floating point results.
3986
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003987- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3988 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3989 has been increased.
3990
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003991- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3992 executed.
3993
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003994- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3995 postinstallation script.
3996
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003997- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3998 test the current module.
3999
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004000- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004001 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4002 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4003 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4004 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4005
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004006- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004007 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004008 Ward's Optik package.
4009
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004010- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4011 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4012 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4013 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4014
4015- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4016 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004017 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004018
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004019- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4020 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4021 shelf are binary pickles.
4022
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004023- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4024 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4025
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004026- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4027 modules are iterators now.
4028
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004029- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4030 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4031 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4032 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4033 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4034 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004035
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004036- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4037 with their entity value.
4038
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004039- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4040
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004041- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4042 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004043
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004044- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4045 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004046 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004047
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004048- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4049 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4050 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4051 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4052 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4053 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4054 main():
4055
4056 import locale
4057 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4058
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004059- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4060 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4061
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004062- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4063 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4064 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4065 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4066 to the new standard.
4067
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004068- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4069 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4070 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4071 an extension to the database.
4072
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004073- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4074 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4075 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4076 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004077 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004078
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004079- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004080 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004081
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004082- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4083 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4084 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4085 bounded integers.
4086
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004087- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4088 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4089 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4090 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4091 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4092 in existence.
4093
4094 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4095 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4096 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4097 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4098 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4099 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4100
4101 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4102 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4103 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4104 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4105
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004106- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4107 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4108 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4109
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004110- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4111
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004112- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4113 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4114 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4115 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4116
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004117- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4118 argument.
4119
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004120- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4121 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4122 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4123 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4124 [SF patch 560794].
4125
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004126- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4127 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4128 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004129 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4130 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4131 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004132
4133- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4134 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004135
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004136- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4137 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4138 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4139 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004140
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004141- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4142 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4143 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4144 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4145 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4146
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004147- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004148
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004149- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4150
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004151- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4152 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4153 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4154 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4155 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4156 identical to None.
4157
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004158- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4159 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4160 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4161 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4162 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4163 results now.
4164
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004165- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4166 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4167
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004168- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4169 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4170 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4171 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4172 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4173 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4174 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4175 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4176
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004177- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4178
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004179- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4180 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4181
4182- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4183 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4184 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4185 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4186 and other systems.
4187
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004188- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4189 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4190 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4191 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 +00004192 work well with these.
4193
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004194- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4195
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004196- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004197 connections.
4198
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004199- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4200 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4201 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4202
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004203- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4204 sets
4205
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004206- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4207 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4208 name.
4209
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004210- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4211 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4212 passed in.
4213
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004214- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004215 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004216 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4217 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004218
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004219- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4220
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004221- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4222
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004223- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4224 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4225 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4226
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004227- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4228 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4229 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4230 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004231 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004232
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004233- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004234 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004235 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004236
4237- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4238 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4239 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4240
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004241- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004242 the value of its expression argument.
4243
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004244- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4245 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4246 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4247
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004248- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4249 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4250 skipstone browser was included.
4251
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004252- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4253 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4254
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004255Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004257
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004258- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4259 names in addition to accepting file names.
4260
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004261- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4262 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4263 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4264 still used and useful.)
4265
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004266- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4267 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4268 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4269 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004270
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004271- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4272 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4273 the generated binary.
4274
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004275Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004277
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004278- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4279
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004280- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4281 except in the hands of experts.
4282
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004283- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004284 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4285 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4286 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004287
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004288- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4289 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4290 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4291 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4292 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4293 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4294 builds.
4295
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004296- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4297 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4298 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4299 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4300 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4301 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4302 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4303 new type.
4304
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004305- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004306
4307 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4308 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4309 positive infinities.
4310
4311 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4312 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4313 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4314 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4315 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4316 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4317 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4318
4319 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4320
4321 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4322
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004323- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4324 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4325 size of the executable.
4326
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004327- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4328 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4329 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4330 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004331
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004332- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4333
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004334- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4335 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4336 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004337
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004338- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4339 well as Unix.
4340
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004341- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4342 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4343 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4344 modules in the README file for details.
4345
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004346C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004348
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004349- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4350 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004351 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004352 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004353 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004354
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004355- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4356 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4357 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4358 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4359 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4360 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004361 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004362 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4363 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4364 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4365 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4366 aligned.)
4367
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004368- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4369 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4370 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4371
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004372- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4373 level.
4374
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004375- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4376 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4377 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4378 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4379 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4380
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004381- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4382 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4383 code.
4384
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004385- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4386 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4387 adjusting for negative indices.
4388
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004389- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4390 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4391 object.
4392
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004393- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4394 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4395 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4396
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004397- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4398 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004399
4400- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4401
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004402- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4403 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4404 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4405 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4406
4407- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4408
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004409- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004410
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004411- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004412 without going through the buffer API.
4413
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004415
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004416- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4417 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4418 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4419 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4420
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004421- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4422 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4423
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004424- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004425 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004427New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004429
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004430- OpenVMS is now supported.
4431
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004432- AtheOS is now supported.
4433
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004434- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4435
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004436- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
4440
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004441- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4442 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4443 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004444
4445Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004447
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004448- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4449 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4450 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4451 bugs.
4452 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004453 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004454 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4455 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004456 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004457
4458- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004459 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004460
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004461- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4462 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4463
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004464- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4465 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004466 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004467 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4468
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004469- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4470 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4471 use files" uninstall option).
4472
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004473- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4474
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004475- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4476 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4477
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004478- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4479 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4480 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4481
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004482- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4483 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4484 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4485 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4486 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004487 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4488 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4489 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004490
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004491- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004492 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004493 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4494 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4495 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4496 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4497 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4498 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4499 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4500 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4501 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4502 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4503 work around.
4504
4505- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4506 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4507 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4508 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4509 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4510 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4511 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4512 specified with O_CREAT too).
4513
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004514Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515----
4516
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004517- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004518
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004519- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4520 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4521 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4522
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004523- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4524 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4525 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4526
4527- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4528 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4529 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4530 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4531 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4532 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4533 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4534 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004535
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004536- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4537 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4538 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004539
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004540- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4541 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4542 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4543 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4544 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004545
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004546- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4547 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4548 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004549
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004550- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4551 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004552
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004553- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4554 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4555 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4556 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4557 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004558
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004559- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4560 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4561 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4562
4563- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4564 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4565 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004567- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4568 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4569 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4570 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004571 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004572
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004573- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4574 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004576- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4577 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004578
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004579- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004580 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004581 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4582 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004583
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004584
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004585What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004586===============================
4587
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4589
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004590Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004593- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4594 with a custom metaclass.
4595
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004596Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004599- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4600 are proxies.
4601
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004602Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004604
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004605- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4606 very short strings.
4607
4608- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4609 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4610 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4611 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4612 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4613
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004614Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004616
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004617- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4618 close or delete time).
4619
4620- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4621 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4622
4623- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4624
4625- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004626 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004627
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004628Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004630
4631Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004633
4634C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004636
4637New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004639
4640Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004642
4643Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004645
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004646- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4647
4648- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4649 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4650
4651- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4652 deleted at process exit time.
4653
4654- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4655 in backslash.
4656
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004657Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004659
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004660- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4661 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4662 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4663
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004664
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004665What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004666===========================
4667
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4669
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004670Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004672
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004673- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4674 been extensively updated. See
4675
4676 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4677
4678 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4679
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004680- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4681 deleted!
4682
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004683- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4684 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4685 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4686 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4687 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4688
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004689- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4690
4691 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4692 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4693
4694 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4695 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4696 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4697 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4698 supported anyway.
4699
4700 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4701 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4702
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004703- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4704 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4705 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4706 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4707 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004708
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004709- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4710 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4711 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4712
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004713Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004715
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004716- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4717 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4718 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4719 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4720 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4721 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004722 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4723 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4724 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4725 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004726
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004727- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4728 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4729 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4730
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004731Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004733
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004734- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4735
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004736Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004739- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4740 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4741 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4742 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4743 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4744 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4745
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004746- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4747
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004748- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4749
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004750- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4751
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004752- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4753 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4754 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4755
4756- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4757
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004758Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004760
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004761- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4762 off a search on Google.
4763
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004764Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004766
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004767- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4768 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4769 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4770 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4771 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4772 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4773 other platforms should do likewise.
4774
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004775- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4776 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4777 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4778
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004779C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004781
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004782- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4783 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4784 producing key-value pairs.
4785
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004786- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004787 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004788 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4789 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4790 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4791 previously went unchallenged.
4792
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004793New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004795
4796Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004798
4799Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004801
4802Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004804
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004805- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4806 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004807
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004808- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4809 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4810 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4811 home.
4812
4813
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004814What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815===========================
4816
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004819Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004822- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4823 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004824
4825 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004826 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004827
4828 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4829 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004830 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004831 This needs to be documented.
4832
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004833- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4834 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4835
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004836- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4837 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4838 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4839
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004840- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4841 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4842
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004843- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4844 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4845 class forbids it).
4846
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004847- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4848 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4849 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4850
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004851- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4852
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004853Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004855
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004856- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4857 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004858 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004859
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004860- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4861 (like 1 + '').
4862
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004863Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004865
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004866- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4867 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4868 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4869 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004870 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004871 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4872
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004873- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4874 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4875 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4876 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4877
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004878- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4879 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004880 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4881 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4882 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004883
4884- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4885 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004886
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004887- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4888 bytes on its input.
4889
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004890Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004891-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004892
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004893- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004894 convenience function.
4895
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004896- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4897 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4898 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004899 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4900 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4901 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4902 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4903 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4904 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004905
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004906- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4907 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4908 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4909 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4910
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004911- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4912 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4913 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4914
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004915- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4916 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4917 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4918 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4919
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004920- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4921 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004923 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4924 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4925 new -l and -e options.
4926
4927- statcache is now deprecated.
4928
4929- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4930 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004932 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4933 time properly taken into account.
4934
4935- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4936 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4937 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4938 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4939
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004940Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004942
4943Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004945
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004946- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4947 is built with libdb3 if available.
4948
4949- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4950
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004953
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004954- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4955 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4956 PySequence_Size().
4957
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004958- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4959
4960- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4961 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4962 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4963
4964- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4965 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4966
4967- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4968 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4969
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004970New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004972
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004973- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4974 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4975
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004976- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4977 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4978
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004979- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004981Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004983
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004984- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4985 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004987Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004989
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004990Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004992
4993- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4994 removed completely in the next release.
4995
4996- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4997 OSX.
4998
4999- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5000 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5001
5002- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5003
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005004
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005005What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005006===========================
5007
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5009
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005010Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005012
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005013- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005014 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005015 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005016 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5017 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005018 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5019 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005020 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5021 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005022
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005023- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5024 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5025
5026- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5027 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5028
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005029Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005031
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005032- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5033 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5034 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5035 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5036 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5037 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5038 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5039 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5040
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005041- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5042 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5043 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5044 example).
5045
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005046- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005047 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005048 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005049 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005050
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005051- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5052 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5053 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005054 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005055
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005056- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5057 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5058 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5059 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5060 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5061 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5062
5063 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5064
5065 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5066
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005067Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005069
5070- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5071
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005072- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5073
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005074- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5075 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005076
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005077- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5078 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5079 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5080 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5081 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5082 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005083 attributes.
5084
5085- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5086 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5087 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005088
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005089- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5090 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5091 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005092
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005093- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5094 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5095 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005096 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5097 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5098
5099- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5100 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005101
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005102Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005104
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005105- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5106 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5107
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005108- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5109 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5110 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5111 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5112
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005113- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5114 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5115 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5116 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5117
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005118 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5119 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5120 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5121 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5122 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5123 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5124 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5125 without losing information).
5126
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005127- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005128 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5129 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5130 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5131 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5132 module).
5133
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005134 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005135 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5136 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5137 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5138 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005139
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005140- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005141 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5142 encoding.
5143
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005144- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5145 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5146
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005148 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5149
5150- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5151 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5152 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5153 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5154
5155- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5156
5157- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5158 ON, and OFF.
5159
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005160- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5161 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5162
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005163Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005165
5166- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5167 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5168 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005169
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005170- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5171 been added: -X and -E.
5172
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005173Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005175
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005176- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5177 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5178
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005179C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005181
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005182- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5183 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5184 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5185 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5186 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5187
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005188- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5189 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5190 as long) arguments.
5191
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005192- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5193 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5194 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5195 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5196 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5197 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5198
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005199- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5200 input.
5201
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005202New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005204
5205Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005207
5208Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005210
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005211- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5212 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5213 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5214
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005215- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5216 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5217 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005218 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005219
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5221 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5222 import signal
5223 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005224
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005226 while 1:
5227 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005228 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005229 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5230 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5231 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5232 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005233
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005234
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005235What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5236===========================
5237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005238*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5239
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005240Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005242
5243- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5244 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5245 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5246
5247- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5248 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5249 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5250 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5251 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5252 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5253 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005254
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005255- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005256 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005257 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5258 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5259 associate a docstring with a property.
5260
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005261- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5262 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5263 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5264 other built-in object types.
5265
5266- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5267 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5268 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5269 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5270 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5271
5272- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5273 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5274
5275- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5276 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005277 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005278 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5279 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5280 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5281 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5282 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5283
5284- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5285 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5286 class.
5287
5288- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5289 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5290 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5291 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5292
5293- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5294 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5295 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5296 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5297
5298- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5299 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5300
5301- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5302 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5303 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5304 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5305 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005306 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005307 with the same value as s.
5308
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005309- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5310
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005311Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005313
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005314- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5315
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005316- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5317 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5318 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5319 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5320 objects.
5321
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005322- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5323 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005324 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5325 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005327- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5328 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5329 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5330
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005331Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005333
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005334- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5335 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5336 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5337 by the instances.
5338
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005339- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5340 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5341 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5342
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005343- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5344 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5345 before the entire comparison is complete.
5346
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005347- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5348 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5349 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5350
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005351- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5352 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5353 getwriter().
5354
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005355- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5356 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5357
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005358- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5360 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5361
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005362- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5363 iterable object.
5364
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005365- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5366 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005368- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5369 authentication.
5370
5371- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5372 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005373
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005374- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005375 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5376 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5377 a sample driver.)
5378
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005379Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005382- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5383 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5384 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5385 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5386 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5387 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5388 kernel has large file support.
5389
5390- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5391 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5392 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5393 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5394 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5395
5396- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5397 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5398 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5399
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005400C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005402
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005403- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5404 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5405
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005406New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005408
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005409- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5410 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5411
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005412Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005414
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005415- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5416 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5417 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5418 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5419 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5420
5421- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5422 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5423 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5424 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5425
5426- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5427 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5428
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005429Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005431
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005432- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005433 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5434 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005435
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005436
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005437What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5438===========================
5439
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005440*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5441
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005442Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005443----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005444
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005445- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5446 big to represent as a C double.
5447
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005448- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5449 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5450 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5451 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5452 restriction).
5453
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005454- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5455 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5456 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5457 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5458 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5459
5460 >>> dir([])
5461 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5462 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5463 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5464 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5465 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5466 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5467 'reverse', 'sort']
5468
5469 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5470
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005471- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005472 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5473 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5474 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5475 OverflowError exception.
5476
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005477- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005478 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005479 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5480 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5481 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5482 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5483 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005484 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005485 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5486 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5487
5488 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5489 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5490 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5491 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005492
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005493- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005494 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5495 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5496 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5497 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5498 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5499 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5500 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5501 once it is created.
5502
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005503- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5504 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5505 (key, value) pairs.
5506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005507- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005508 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5509 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5510
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005511- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5512 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5513 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5514 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5515 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005516
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005517- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005518 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5519 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5520
5521 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005523- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005524 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5525
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005526Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005528
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005529- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005530 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5531 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005532
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005533- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5534 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5535 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5536 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5537 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5538 in this area anymore).
5539
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005540- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5541 threading.Timer.
5542
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005543- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5544 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5545
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005546- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005547 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5548
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005549- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005550 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5551 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5552 converted to Python longs.
5553
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005554- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005555 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5556
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005557- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5558 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5559 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5560
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005561Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005563
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005564- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5565 division operators as per PEP 238.
5566
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005567Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005569
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005570- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5571 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5572 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5573 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5574
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005575C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005577
5578- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005579
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005580- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5581 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005582 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005583
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005584 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5585 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005586 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005587 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005588
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005589- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005590 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5591 module:
5592
5593 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005594
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005595 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5596 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005597
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005598 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5599 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005600
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005601 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5602
5603 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005605- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005606 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5607 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5608 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005609
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005610New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005611-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005612
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005613- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5614 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5615 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5616 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5617 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005618
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005619Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005621
5622Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005624
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005625- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5626 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5627 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5628 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005629 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5630 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5631 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5632 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5633 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005635- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005636 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5637
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005638
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005639What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5640===========================
5641
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5643
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005644Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005646
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005647- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5648 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5649
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005650- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5651 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5652 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005653
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005654- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5655 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5656 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5657 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005658
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005659- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5660
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005662
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005663Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005665
5666- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005667 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005668 the module docstring for details.
5669
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005671-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005672
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005673- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005674 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5675 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5676 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005677
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005678- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5679 Nick Mathewson.
5680
5681Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005683
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005684- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5685 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5686 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5687 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5688 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5689 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5690 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5691 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5692
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005693- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5694 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5695 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5696 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5697
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005698- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5699 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5700 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5701 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5702 come a long way).
5703
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005704- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5705 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5706 write filters for these warnings).
5707
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005708- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5709 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5710 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5711 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5712 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5713
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005714- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5715 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5716 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5717 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5718 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5719 older distribution.
5720
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005721Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005722-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005723
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005724- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5725 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005726 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005727
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005728- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5729 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5730 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5731
5732- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5733
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005734- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5735
5736- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5737
5738- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5739
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005740- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005741
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005742- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5743
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005744New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005745-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005746
5747C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005749
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005750- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5751 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5752 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5753 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5754 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5755 against buffer overruns.
5756
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005757- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005758 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5759 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005760 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5761 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5762 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5763
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005764- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5765 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5766 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5767 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5768 deprecated.
5769
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005770Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005772
5773- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5774 relevant is found.
5775
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005776
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005777What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005778===========================
5779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5781
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005782Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005783----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005784
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005785- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5786 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5787 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5788 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5789 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5790 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5791 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5792 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005793 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005794 repaired.
5795
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005796- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005797 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005798 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5799 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5800 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5801 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5802 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5803 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5804 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5805 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5806
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005807- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5808 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5809 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5810 leading BMO character).
5811
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005812- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5813 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5814 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5815
5816 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5817 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5818 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005819
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005820 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5821 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5822 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5823 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5824 for various simple to use conversions.
5825
5826 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5827 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5828
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005829 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5830 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5831 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5832 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5833 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5834 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5835 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5836 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5837 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5838 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5839 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5840 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5841 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5842 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5843 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005844
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005845- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5846 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5847 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005848 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005849 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005850
5851 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005852 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5853 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5854 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5855 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5856 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005857 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5858 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005859
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005860 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5861 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5862 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005863 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005864
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005865- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5866 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5867 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5868 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5869 floating arithmetic,
5870
5871 x = 9007199254740992.0
5872 print long(x)
5873
5874 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5875 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5876 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5877 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5878 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5879 functions are of good quality).
5880
5881 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5882 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5883 algorithms to break.
5884
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005885- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5886 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5887 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5888 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5889 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5890 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5891 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5892 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5893 order.
5894
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005895- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5896 operation along the most common code paths.
5897
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005898- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5899 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5900
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005901- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5902 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5903 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5904 {}.update(UserDict())
5905
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005906- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5907 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5908 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5909 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5910 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5911 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5912 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5913 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5914
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005915- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005916 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005917
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005918 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005919 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5920 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005921 join() method of strings
5922 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005923 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5924 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005925 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005926 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005927
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005928- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5929 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5930
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005931- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5932 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5933
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005934- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5935 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5936 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5937 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5938
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005939- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5940 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005941 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005942 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5943 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005944
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005945- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5946
5947
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005949-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005950
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005951- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005952 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005953 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5954 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5955
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005956- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5957 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5958
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005959- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5960 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5961 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5962 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5963
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005964- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5965 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5966 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5967
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005968- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5969
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005970- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5971
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005972- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5973 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5974 that are still imported into string.py).
5975
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005976- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5977
5978- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5979 Now it does.
5980
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005981- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5982
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005983- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5984 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5985 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5986 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5987 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005988 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5989 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005990
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005991- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5992 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5993 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5994 'help(object)'.
5995
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005997-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005998
5999- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006000 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006001 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6002 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6003
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006004- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006005 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6006 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006007
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006008C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006009-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006010
6011- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6012 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006013
6014----
6015
6016**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**