blob: 4eb7bb15f127b208c15475dfb010140661893217 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000013- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
14
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000015- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
16 returning None.
17
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000018- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
19 ('\') with a specific error message.
20
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000021- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
22
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000023- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
24 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
25
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000026- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000027 an ferror() call.
28
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000029- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
30 list.sort().
31
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000032- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
33 (2+3) --> (5).
34
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000035- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
36
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000037- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
38 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000039
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000040- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
41 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
42 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
43
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044Extension Modules
45-----------------
46
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000047- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
48 file size.
49
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000050- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
51
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000052- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
53 {remove_history,replace_history}
54
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000055- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
56 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000057
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000058- stat_float_times is now True.
59
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000060- array.array objects are now picklable.
61
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000062- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
63 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
64
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000065- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
66 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
67 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
68
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000069- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
70 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000071
72Library
73-------
74
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +000075- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
76 symbolic links on Windows.
77
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000078- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
79 profile.py if available.
80
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000081- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
82
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000083- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
84 in LWPCookieJar.
85
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000086- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
87
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000088- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
89
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000090- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
91
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000092- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
93
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000094- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
95
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000096- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
97
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000098- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
99
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000100- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
101
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000102- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
103 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
104 be exploited in various ways.
105
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000106- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
107
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000108- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
109
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000110- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
111
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000112- Enhancements to the csv module:
113
114 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
115 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
116 PEP 305.
117 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
118 reporting.
119 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
120 dictates.
121 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000122 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000123 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000124 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
125 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000126 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
127 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000128 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000129 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
130 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
131 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
132 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
133 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
134 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
135 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
136 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
137 without first creating a dialect class.
138 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
139 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
140 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000141 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000142 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
143 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000144 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
145 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
146 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
147 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000148 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
149 This has been fixed.
150
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000151- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
152 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
153 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
154 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
155
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000156- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
157
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000158- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
159 (Bug #951915).
160
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000161- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
162 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
163 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
164 encoding alias table
165
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000166- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
167
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000168- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
169 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
170
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000171- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
172
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000173- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
174
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000175- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
176
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000177- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
178
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000179- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
180
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000181- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
182 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
183 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
184
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000185- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000186 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000187
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000188- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
189 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
190 tokenizer with very long source lines.
191
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000192- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
193 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
194
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000195- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
196 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000197
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000198- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
199 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
200
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000201Build
202-----
203
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000204- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
205 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
206
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000207- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
208 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
209 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
210 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
211 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
212 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
213 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
214 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
215
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000216- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
217 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
218 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
219 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
220
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000221
222C API
223-----
224
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000225- Removed PyRange_New().
226
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000227
228Tests
229-----
230
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000231- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000232
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000233
234Documentation
235-------------
236
237- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
238 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
239 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
240
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000241Mac
242---
243
244
245
246Tools/Demos
247-----------
248
249
250
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000251What's New in Python 2.4 final?
252===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000253
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000254*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000255
256Core and builtins
257-----------------
258
259- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
260 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
261 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
262
263
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000264What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
265==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000266
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000267*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000268
269Core and builtins
270-----------------
271
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000272- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
273 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
274 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
275
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000276
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000277Library
278-------
279
280- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
281 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
282 raised is re-raised.
283
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000284- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
285 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
286
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000287- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
288 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
289 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
290 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
291 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
292 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
293 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
294 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
295 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
296 by the slice are recomputed now.
297
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000298- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000299
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000300Build
301-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000302
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000303- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
304 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
305 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000306
307C API
308-----
309
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000310- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
311
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000312
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000313What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
314================================
315
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000316*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000317
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000318License
319-------
320
321The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
322is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
323changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
324Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
325intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
326durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
327the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
328License::
329
330 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
331
332says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
333to Python 2.1.1.
334
335The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
336License Version 2.
337
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000338Core and builtins
339-----------------
340
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000341- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
342 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
343 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
344 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
345 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
346 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
347 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
348 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
349 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
350 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
351
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000352- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000353
354Extension Modules
355-----------------
356
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000357- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
358 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
359 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
360 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000361
362Library
363-------
364
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000365- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
366 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
367 returned.
368
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000369- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
370
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000371- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
372 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
373
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000374- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
375
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000376- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
377 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000378
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000379- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
380
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000381- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
382
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000383- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000384 the source code is updated and reloaded.
385
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000386Build
387-----
388
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000389- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000390
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000391What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
392================================
393
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000394*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000395
396Core and builtins
397-----------------
398
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000399- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000400 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
401
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000402- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
403 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
404 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
405 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
406
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000407- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
408 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
409
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000410- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
411 constant.
412
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000413- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
414 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
415 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
416 large), and to anomalies such as
417 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
418 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
419 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
420 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000421
422Extension modules
423-----------------
424
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000425- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
426 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000427 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
428 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
429 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000430
431Library
432-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000433
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000434- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000435 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000436 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
437 --swig-cpp.
438
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000439- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
440 it is set.
441
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000442- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000443
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000444- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
445 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
446 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
447 Closes bug #1039270.
448
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000449- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000450
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000451 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000452 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
453 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
454 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
455 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
456 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
457 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
458 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
459 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
460 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
461 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
462 + Updates to documentation.
463
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000464- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
465 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
466 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
467 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
468
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000469- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000470
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000471- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
472 applications should use the getmember function.
473
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000474- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
475
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000476- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
477 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
478 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
479 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
480 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
481 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
482 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
483 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
484 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
485
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000486- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
487 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000488 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000489
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000490- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
491 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
492 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
493 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
494 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
495 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
496 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
497 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000498
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000499- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
500 the new public features (of which there are many).
501
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000502- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000503 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
504 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
505 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
506 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000507 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000508
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000509- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
510
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000511- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
512 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
513 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
514 options.
515
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000516- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
517 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
518 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
519 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
520 conditions under which non-string values work.
521
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000522Build
523-----
524
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000525- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
526 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
527 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
528
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000529- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
530 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
531 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
532 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
533 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000534
535C API
536-----
537
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000538- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
539 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
540
541- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
542
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000543- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
544 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
545 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
546 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
547 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
548 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
549 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
550 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
551 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
552
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000553- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
554
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000555- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
556 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
557 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000558
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000559Tests
560-----
561
562- test__locale ported to unittest
563
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000564Mac
565---
566
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000567- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
568 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
569 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000570
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000571Tools/Demos
572-----------
573
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000574- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
575 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
576 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
577 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
578 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000579
580
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000581What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
582=================================
583
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000584*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000585
586Core and builtins
587-----------------
588
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000589- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000590 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
591
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000592- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
593 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
594 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
595 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
596 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
597 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
598 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
599 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000600 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
601 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
602 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
603 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
604 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000605
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000606- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
607 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
608 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
609 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
610 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
611
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000612- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
613
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000614- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
615 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
616
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000617- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
618 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
619 modified the list.
620
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000621- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
622 functions is now writable.
623
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000624- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
625 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
626 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
627 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
628
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000629- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
630 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
631 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
632 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
633 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000634
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000635- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
636 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
637
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000638Extension modules
639-----------------
640
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000641- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
642
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000643- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
644 data.
645
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000646- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
647 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
648 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
649 supposed to have been truncated away.
650
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000651- Added socket.socketpair().
652
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000653- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
654 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
655
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000656- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000657 versions of Python, have now been removed.
658
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000659Library
660-------
661
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000662- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000663 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000664
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000665- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
666 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
667
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000668- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
669 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
670
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000671- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
672
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000673- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
674 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000675
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000676- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
677 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
678
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000679- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
680
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000681- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
682
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000683- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
684
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000685- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
686 Percivall.
687
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000688- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
689 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
690
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000691- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
692 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
693 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000694 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000695
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000696- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
697 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
698 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
699 and exponent.
700
701- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
702
703- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
704 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
705 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
706
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000707- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
708 to the readline module.
709
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000710- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000711 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
712 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000713
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000714- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
715 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
716 contains symlinks.
717
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000718- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
719 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
720
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000721- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
722 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
723 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
724
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000725- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
726 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
727 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
728 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
729 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
730 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
731 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
732 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
733 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
734 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
735 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
736 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
737 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
738
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000739- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
740
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000741Tools/Demos
742-----------
743
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000744- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
745 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
746
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000747- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
748
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000749Build
750-----
751
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000752- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
753 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
754 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
755 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
756 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
757 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
758 plans to do so.
759
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000760- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
761 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
762
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000763- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
764 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
765
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000766- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
767 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
768
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000769- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
770 GNU/k*BSD systems.
771
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000772- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
773 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
774
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000775C API
776-----
777
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000778..
779
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000780Documentation
781-------------
782
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000783- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
784 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
785
786- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
787 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
788 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000789
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000790New platforms
791-------------
792
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000793- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
794
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000795Tests
796-----
797
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000798..
799
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000800Windows
801-------
802
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000803- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
804 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
805 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
806 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
807 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
808 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
809 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
810 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
811 the problem.
812
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000813Mac
814---
815
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000816..
817
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000818
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000819What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
820=================================
821
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000822*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000823
824Core and builtins
825-----------------
826
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000827- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
828 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
829 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
830 sensitive code.
831
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000832- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000833 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000834
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000835 @staticmethod
836 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000837
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000838 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000839
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000840- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
841 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
842 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
843 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
844 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
845 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
846 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
847 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
848 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
849 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
850 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
851
852 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
853 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
854 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
855 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
856 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
857 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
858 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
859
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000860- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
861 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
862
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000863- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000864 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000865
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000866- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000867 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000868 which was missing for no apparent reason.
869
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000870- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000871 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
872 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
873
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000874- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
875 types that support garbage collection.
876
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000877- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
878
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000879- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
880 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
881 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
882 Jython.
883
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000884- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
885
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000886- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
887 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
888
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000889- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
890 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
891 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000892
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000893- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
894 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
895 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
896
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000897Extension modules
898-----------------
899
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000900- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
901
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000902Library
903-------
904
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000905- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
906 TIS-620
907
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000908- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
909 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
910 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
911 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
912 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
913 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
914 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
915 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
916 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
917 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
918
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000919- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
920
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000921- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
922 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
923 same as when the argument is omitted).
924 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
925
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000926- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
927
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000928- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
929 schemes are offered.
930
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000931- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
932
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000933- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
934 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
935 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
936
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000937- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
938
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000939- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
940 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
941
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000942- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
943 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
944 when dummy_threading is being used.
945
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000946- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
947 from a tarfile.
948
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000949- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000950 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000951
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000952- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
953 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
954 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
955 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
956
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000957- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
958 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
959
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000960- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
961 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
962 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
963 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
964 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
965 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
966 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
967 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
968 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
969 by some other method in progress).
970
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000971- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
972 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
973 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000974
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000975- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
976
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000977- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
978 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
979 AM Kuchling.
980
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000981- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
982 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
983 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
984
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000985- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
986 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
987 instead of unsigned.
988
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000989- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000990 no longer part of the public API.
991
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000992- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
993 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
994 string methods of the same name).
995
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000996- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000997 SF patch 945642.
998
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000999- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1000
1001 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1002
1003 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1004 DocTestSuites.
1005
1006- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1007 that provide thread-local data.
1008
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001009- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1010 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1011
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001012- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1013
1014- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1015 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1016 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1017
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001018- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1019
1020 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1021 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1022 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001023
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001024 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1025 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1026 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1027 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1028
1029 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1030 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1031
1032 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1033 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1034 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1035 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1036
1037 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1038 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1039 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1040 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1041 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1042
1043 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1044 wrapping help output.
1045
1046 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1047 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1048 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001049
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001050C API
1051-----
1052
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001053- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1054 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1055 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1056 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1057 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1058 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1059 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1060 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1061 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1062 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1063 its visible semantics have not changed.
1064
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001065- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1066 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1067
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001068Documentation
1069-------------
1070
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001071- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001072
1073 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001074 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001075
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001076 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001077
1078 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1079
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001080- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001081
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001082Tests
1083-----
1084
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001085- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001086 platforms that use the Makefile.
1087
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001088- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1089 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1090 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1091
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001092
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001093What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1094=================================
1095
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001096*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001097
1098Core and builtins
1099-----------------
1100
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001101- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1102 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1103 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1104 objects now (one object instead of three).
1105
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001106- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1107 Windows DLLs.
1108
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001109- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1110 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001111
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001112- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1113 a new .pyc magic.
1114
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001115- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1116 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1117 be there.
1118
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001119- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1120 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1121 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1122
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001123- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1124 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1125 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1126
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001127- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1128
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001129- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1130 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1131 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001132
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001133- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1134 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1135
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001136- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1137
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001138- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001139 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001140
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001141- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1142
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001143- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1144
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001145- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1146 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1147
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001148- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1149 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1150 Fixes bug #858016 .
1151
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001152- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1153 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1154 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1155
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001156- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1157 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1158 improves their performance (about 35%).
1159
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001160- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1161 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1162 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1163
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001164- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1165 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1166 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1167 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1168
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001169- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1170 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1171 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1172 length is not known).
1173
1174- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1175 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001176 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1177 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001178 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1179
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001180- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1181 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1182
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001183- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1184 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1185 keyword arguments.
1186
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001187- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1188 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1189 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1190
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001191- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1192 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1193 cases.
1194
1195- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1196 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1197 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1198 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1199 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1200 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1201 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1202 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1203 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1204 a release build.
1205
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001206- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1207 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1208
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001209- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001210 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001211
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001212- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1213 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1214 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1215 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1216 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1217 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1218 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1219 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1220 destroyed.
1221
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001222- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1223 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1224 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1225 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1226 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1227 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1228 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1229 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1230
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001231- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1232 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1233 character other than a space.
1234
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001235- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1236 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1237 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1238 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1239 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1240 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1241 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1242 attributes with the same name.
1243
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001244- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1245 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1246 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1247 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1248 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1249 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1250 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1251 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1252 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1253 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1254 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1255 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1256 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1257 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001258
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001259- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1260 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1261 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1262 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1263 This has been repaired.
1264
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001265- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1266
1267- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1268
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001269- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1270 over a sequence.
1271
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001272- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001273 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001274
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001275- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1276
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001277- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1278 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1279 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1280 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1281 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1282 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1283 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1284 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1285
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001286- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1287 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1288 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1289
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001290- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1291 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1292 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1293 freelist.
1294
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001295- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1296 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1297
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001298- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1299 number.
1300
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001301- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1302 a TypeError exception.
1303
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001304- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1305 820195.
1306
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001307- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1308 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1309 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1310
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001311- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001312 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1313 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001314
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001315- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1316 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1317 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1318
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001319- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1320 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001321 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001322
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001323- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001324 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1325 the first call.
1326
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001327
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001328Extension modules
1329-----------------
1330
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001331- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1332 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1333
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001334- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1335 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1336 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1337 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1338 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1339 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1340 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001341
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001342- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1343
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001344- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1345
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001346- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1347 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1348
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001349- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1350 fewer false positives.
1351
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001352- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1353 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1354
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001355- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001356 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1357
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001358- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001359 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001360 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001361 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1362 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001363
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001364- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1365 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1366 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1367 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1368
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001369- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1370 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1371 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1372 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1373 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1374 #897625.
1375
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001376- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1377 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1378
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001379- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1380 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1381 and pops on either side of the deque.
1382
1383- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1384 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1385
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001386- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1387 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1388 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1389 other functions that expect a function argument.
1390
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001391- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1392
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001393- os.getsid was added.
1394
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001395- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1396 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1397 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1398
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001399- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1400
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001401- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1402
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001403- readline.clear_history was added.
1404
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001405- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1406
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001407- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1408
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001409- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1410
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001411- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1412
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001413- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1414
1415- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1416
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001417- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1418
1419- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1420
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001421- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1422 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1423 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1424
1425- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1426 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1427 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1428 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1429 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1430 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1431 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1432
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001433- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1434 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1435 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1436 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001437
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001438- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001439 iterators from a single iterable.
1440
1441- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1442 of raising a TypeError exception.
1443
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001444- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1445 as parameter.
1446
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001447Library
1448-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001449
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001450- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1451 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1452 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001453
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001454- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1455 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1456 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001457
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001458- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001459
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001460- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1461 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001462
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001463- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1464 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1465
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001466- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1467
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001468- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001469 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001470
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001471- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001472 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001473
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001474- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1475
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001476- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1477 on cygwin and mingw32.
1478
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001479- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1480
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001481- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1482 module.
1483
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001484- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1485 installation scheme for all platforms.
1486
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001487- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001488 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001489
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001490- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1491 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1492 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1493
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001494- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1495 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1496 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1497
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001498- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1499
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001500- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1501
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001502- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1503 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1504
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001505- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1506 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1507 type pattern with the same value exists.
1508
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001509- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1510 when run from the command prompt).
1511
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001512- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1513 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1514
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001515- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1516 default sort).
1517
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001518- Added global runctx function to profile module
1519
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001520- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1521
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001522- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1523
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001524- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1525
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001526- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001527 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1528 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1529 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1530 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1531 accordingly.
1532
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001533- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1534 decoding standards.
1535
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001536- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1537 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1538 called for all requests.
1539
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001540- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1541 they are passed to the compiler.
1542
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001543- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1544 indent, width and depth.
1545
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001546- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1547 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1548
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001549- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1550 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1551
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001552- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1553
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001554- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1555
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001556- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1557
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001558- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1559 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1560
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001561- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001562 for better performance.
1563
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001564- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001565
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001566- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1567 a string).
1568
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001569- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1570
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001571- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1572
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001573- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1574
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001575- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1576
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001577- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1578 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1579 list of fieldnames.
1580
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001581- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1582 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1583
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001584- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1585
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001586- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1587 empty lists.
1588
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001589- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1590 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1591 and shelves.
1592
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001593- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1594 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1595
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001596- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001597 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1598 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001599
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001600- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1601 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001602 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001603
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001604- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001605 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1606 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1607
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001608- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1609 and removed in Py2.4.
1610
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001611- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1612
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001613- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1614
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001615Tools/Demos
1616-----------
1617
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001618- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1619 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1620
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001621- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1622
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001623- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1624 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1625 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1626 destination in situations where both files are given.
1627
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001628- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1629 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1630 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1631 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1632
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001633- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1634
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001635- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1636 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1637 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1638 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1639 now.
1640
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001641- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1642 in effect
1643
1644- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1645 C-c C-h
1646
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001647- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1648 -d option was given.
1649
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001650Build
1651-----
1652
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001653- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1654 build under OS X.
1655
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001656- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1657 --enable-profiling.
1658
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001659- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1660 is configured --with-tsc.
1661
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001662- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1663 on AMD64.
1664
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001665- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1666 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1667
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001668- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1669 removed.
1670
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001671- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1672 supported (see PEP 11).
1673
1674- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1675
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001676- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1677
1678- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1679 (see PEP 11).
1680
1681- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1682 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1683
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001684C API
1685-----
1686
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001687- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1688 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1689 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1690
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001691- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1692 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1693 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1694 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1695
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001696- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1697 generator objects.
1698
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001699- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1700 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001701 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1702 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001703
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001704- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1705 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1706
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001707- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1708 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1709 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1710 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1711 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1712
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001713- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1714 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1715 about 10% faster.
1716
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001717- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1718 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1719
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001720- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1721 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1722 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1723 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1724
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001725Windows
1726-------
1727
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001728- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1729 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1730 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1731 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1732
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001733- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1734 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1735 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1736
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001737
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001738What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1739===============================
1740
1741*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1742
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001743IDLE
1744----
1745
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001746- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1747 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1748 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1749 context-menu actions.
1750
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001751- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1752 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1753 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1754 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1755 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1756 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1757 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1758 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1759 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1760
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001761
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001762What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1763=============================================
1764
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001765*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001766
1767Core and builtins
1768-----------------
1769
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001770- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001771 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001772 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1773
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001774Extension modules
1775-----------------
1776
1777- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1778 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1779 than once. This has been fixed.
1780
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001781- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1782 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1783 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1784 call.
1785
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001786- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1787
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001788Library
1789-------
1790
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001791- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1792 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1793
1794- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1795 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1796 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1797 restored.
1798
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001799IDLE
1800----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001801
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001802- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001803
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001804Build
1805-----
1806
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001807- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1808 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1809
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001810C API
1811-----
1812
1813Windows
1814-------
1815
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001816- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1817 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1818
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001819- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1820
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001821Mac
1822---
1823
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001824- Various fixes to pimp.
1825
1826- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1827
1828- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1829 more problems than it solves.
1830
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001831
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001832What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1833=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001834
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001835*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1836
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001837Core and builtins
1838-----------------
1839
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001840- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1841 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1842
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001843- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1844 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001845 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001846
1847- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1848 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1849 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001850 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001851
1852- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1853 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001854
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001855- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1856 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1857 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1858
1859- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001860 770247.
1861
1862- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001863
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001864Extension modules
1865-----------------
1866
1867- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1868 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1869
1870- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1871
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001872- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1873
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001874- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1875 contained within the _strptime module.
1876
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001877- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1878 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1879
1880- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001881 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1882
1883- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1884 the find_class attribute, if present.
1885
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001886- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001887
1888 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1889 (SF bug 763298).
1890
1891 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001892 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1893 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1894 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001895
1896 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1897
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001898Library
1899-------
1900
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001901- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1902
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001903- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1904 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1905 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1906 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1907 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1908 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1909 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1910 or Tester().
1911
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001912- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1913 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1914 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1915 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1916 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1917 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1918 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1919 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1920 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001921
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001922 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001923
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001924- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1925 weren't before was an oversight.
1926
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001927- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1928 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1929
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001930- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1931 when there are no lines.
1932
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001933- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1934 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1935
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001936- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1937 to child processes.
1938
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001939- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1940
1941- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1942
1943- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1944 xmlrpclib.
1945
1946- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1947 responses.
1948
1949- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1950 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1951
1952- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1953 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1954 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1955
1956- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1957 used as patterns.
1958
1959- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1960 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1961 than Tk 8.3.
1962
1963- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1964
1965- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001966
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001967Tools/Demos
1968-----------
1969
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001970- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1971
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001972- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1973
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001974- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001975
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001976Build
1977-----
1978
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001979- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1980
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001981- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1982
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001983- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1984 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001985
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001986- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1987 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1988 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001989
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001990C API
1991-----
1992
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001993- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1994 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1995
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001996Windows
1997-------
1998
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001999- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2000 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2001 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2002 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2003 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2004 Python exception ::
2005
2006 thread.error: can't start new thread
2007
2008 is raised now.
2009
2010- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2011 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2012 instead of from DLL teardown.
2013
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002014Mac
2015---
2016
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002017- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002018 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002019 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2020 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2021 the executable in the bundle.
2022
2023- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002024
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002025- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2026
2027- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2028 on Panther.
2029
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002030What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2031================================
2032
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002033*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002034
2035Core and builtins
2036-----------------
2037
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002038- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2039 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2040 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2041 with the -i option.
2042
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002043- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2044 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2045
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002046- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2047 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2048
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002049- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2050 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2051 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2052 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2053 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2054 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2055 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2056 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2057 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2058 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2059 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2060 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2061 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002062
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002063- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2064 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2065 embedded in a lambda expression.
2066
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002067- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2068 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2069 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2070 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2071 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2072
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002073- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2074 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2075 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2076
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002077- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2078 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2079
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002080- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2081 It's writable again.
2082
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002083- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2084 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2085 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002086 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002087
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002088- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2089 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2090 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2091
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002092Extension modules
2093-----------------
2094
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002095- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2096 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2097
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002098- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2099 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2100 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2101 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2102
2103- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2104 collection.
2105
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002106- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2107 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2108 unique within a single program run.
2109
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002110- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2111 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2112
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002113- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2114 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2115
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002116- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2117 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002118
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002119- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2120
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002121- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2122 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2123
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002124- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2125 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2126 for many BSD-derived systems.
2127
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002128
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002129Library
2130-------
2131
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002132- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2133 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2134 primary ones:
2135
2136 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2137 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2138 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2139
2140 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2141 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2142 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2143 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2144 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2145 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2146
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002147- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2148 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2149 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2150 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2151 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2152 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2153 argument.
2154
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002155- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2156 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2157 in the archive.
2158
2159- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2160 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2161
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002162- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2163 569574).
2164
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002165- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2166 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2167 no more.
2168
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002169- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2170 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2171 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2172 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2173 code coverage.
2174
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002175- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2176 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2177 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002178 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2179 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002180
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002181- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2182 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2183 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002184 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002185
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002186- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2187
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002188- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2189 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2190 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2191 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2192
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002193- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2194 handling.
2195
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002196- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2197 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2198
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002199- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2200 in socket.py.
2201
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002202- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2203
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002204- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2205 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2206 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2207 opener with proxy support.
2208
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002209- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2210
2211- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2212
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002213Tools/Demos
2214-----------
2215
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002216- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2217
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002218- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2219
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002220- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2221 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002222
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002223- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2224 files.
2225
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002226Build
2227-----
2228
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002229- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002230 different root directory.
2231
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002232C API
2233-----
2234
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002235- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2236 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2237 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2238 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2239 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2240 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2241 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2242 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2243 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2244 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2245
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002246- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2247 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2248 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2249 from Python.
2250
2251
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252New platforms
2253-------------
2254
2255None this time.
2256
2257Tests
2258-----
2259
2260- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2261 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2262
2263Windows
2264-------
2265
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002266- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2267
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002268- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2269 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2270 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2271 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2272 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2273 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2274 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2275 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2276 that's what it's for.
2277
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002278Mac
2279---
2280
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002281- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2282 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2283 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2284 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002285- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2286 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2287- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002288
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002289SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2290------------------------------------
2291
2292430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2293598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2294622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2295661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2296683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2297697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2298713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2299724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2300727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2301729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2302730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2303731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2304732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2305733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2306735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2307740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2308744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2309745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2310747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2311749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2312751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2313753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2314755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2315757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2316760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2317
2318
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002319What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2320================================
2321
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002322*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002323
2324Core and builtins
2325-----------------
2326
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002327- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2328 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2329
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002330- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2331 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2332 and cannot be strings).
2333
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002334- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2335 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2336 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2337 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2338
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002339- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2340 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2341 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2342 Python itself.
2343
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002344- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2345 the referenced object, if it has one.
2346
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002347- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2348 the thread started at
2349 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2350
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002351- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2352 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2353 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2354 placed on a list index.
2355
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002356- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2357 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2358 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2359 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2360
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002361- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2362 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2363 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2364 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2365 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2366 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2367 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2368
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002369- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2370 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2371 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2372 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2373 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2374
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002375- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2376 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002377
2378- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2379 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2380 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2381 #693195.)
2382
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002383- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2384 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002385
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002386- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002387 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002388 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2389 interpreter executions, would fail.
2390
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002391- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002392 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002393 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002394
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002395Extension modules
2396-----------------
2397
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002398- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2399 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2400 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2401 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2402
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002403- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2404 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2405
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002406- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2407 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2408 and Greg Chapman.)
2409
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002410- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2411 recursively.
2412
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002413- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002414 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2415 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2416 leaks.
2417
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002418- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2419
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002420- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2421 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2422 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2423 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2424 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2425 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2426 #705836.
2427
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002428- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002429 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2430
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002431- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2432 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2433 See SF bug #692416.
2434
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002435- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2436 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2437
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002438- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2439 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2440 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002441
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002442- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002443 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2444 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2445
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002446- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2447 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2448 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2449 timeouts to work properly.
2450
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002451Library
2452-------
2453
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002454- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2455 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2456 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2457 future release.
2458
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002459- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2460 for querying platform dependent features.
2461
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002462- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002463
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002464- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2465 pickle protocol versions.
2466
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002467- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2468 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2469 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2470
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002471- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2472
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002473- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2474 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2475 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2476 modules.
2477
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002478- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2479 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2480 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2481
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002482- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2483 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2484
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002485- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2486 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2487 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2488
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002489- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002490 MS Office extensions.
2491
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002492- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2493 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2494
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002495- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2496 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2497
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002498- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2499 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2500 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2501 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2502 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2503 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2504
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002505- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2506 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2507 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002508
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002509- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2510 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2511 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2512
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002513- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2514
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002515- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2516 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2517 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2518
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002519Tools/Demos
2520-----------
2521
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002522- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2523 See the module docstring for details.
2524
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002525Build
2526-----
2527
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002528- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2529 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002530
2531C API
2532-----
2533
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002534- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2535
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002536- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2537 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2538 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2539
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002540- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2541 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002542
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002543 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2544 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2545 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002546
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002547- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002548 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2549
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002550- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2551 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2552 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002553
2554New platforms
2555-------------
2556
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002557None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002558
2559Tests
2560-----
2561
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002562- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2563 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002564
2565Windows
2566-------
2567
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002568- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2569 function.
2570
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002571- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2572 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002573
2574Mac
2575---
2576
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002577- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2578 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002579
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002580- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2581 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002582
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002583- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2584 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2585 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002586
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002587- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002588 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2589 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002590
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002591- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2592 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002593
2594
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002595What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2596=================================
2597
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002598*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002599
2600Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002601-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002602
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002603- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2604 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2605 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2606
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002607- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2608 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2609 (SF patch #664376.)
2610
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002611- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2612 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2613 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2614 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2615 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2616 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002617 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002618
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002619- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2620 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2621 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2622 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002623 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002624
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002625- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2626 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2627 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2628 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2629 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2630 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2631 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2632 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2633 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2634 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2635 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2636
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002637- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2638 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2639 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2640 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2641 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2642 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2643
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002644- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2645 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2646
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002647- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2648 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2649 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2650 case.)
2651
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002652- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2653 passed as unicode strings.
2654
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002655- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2656 See SF bug #683467.
2657
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002658- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2659 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2660
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002661- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2662
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002663- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2664
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002665- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2666 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2667 arguments.
2668
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002669- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2670 See SF bug #667147.
2671
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002672- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002673 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002674 See SF bug #676155.
2675
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002676- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002677 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002678 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2679 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2680 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2681 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2682 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2683 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002684
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002685Extension modules
2686-----------------
2687
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002688- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2689 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2690 tp_as_number pointer.
2691
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002692- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2693 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2694 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2695 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2696 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2697
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002698- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2699
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002700- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2701
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002702- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002703 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002704 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2705 patch #678531.)
2706
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002707- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2708 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2709
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002710- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2711 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2712
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002713- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2714
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002715- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2716 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2717 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2718
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002719- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2720
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002721- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2722 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2723
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002724- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002725
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002726- datetime changes:
2727
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002728 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2729
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002730 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2731 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2732 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2733 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2734 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2735 now.
2736
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002737 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002738 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2739 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002740
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002741 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002742 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002743 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2744 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2745 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2746 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002747
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002748 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2749 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2750 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002751 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2752
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002753 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2754 by a later example coded by Guido.
2755
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002756 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002757 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2758 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2759 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002760 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2761 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2762
2763 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2764 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2765 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2766 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2767 tzinfo subclass instance.
2768
2769 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2770 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2771 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2772 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2773 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2774 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2775 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2776 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002777
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002778 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2779 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2780 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2781 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2782 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002783 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2784
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002785 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002786
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002787 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2788 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2789 as a naive datetime object.
2790
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002791 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2792 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2793 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2794
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002795 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2796 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2797 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2798 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2799 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2800 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2801 comparison.
2802
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002803 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2804 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2805 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2806 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002807 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002808
2809 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002810
2811 and ::
2812
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002813 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2814
2815 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2816 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2817 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2818 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2819
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002820 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2821 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2822 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2823 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2824 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2825
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002826 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2827 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002828 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2829 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002831Library
2832-------
2833
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002834- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2835 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2836
2837- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2838 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2839 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2840 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2841 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2842 See PEP 307 for details.
2843
2844- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2845 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2846
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002847- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2848 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002849 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002850 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2851 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002852 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002853
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002854- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2855 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2856
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002857- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2858 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2859 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2860
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002861- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2862
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002863- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2864 exception.
2865
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002866- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2867 class.
2868
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002869- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2870 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2871 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2872
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002873- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2874 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2875
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002876- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002877 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2878 See SF bug #659228.
2879
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002880- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2881 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2882 See SF patch #651082.
2883
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002884- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002885
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002886- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2887 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2888
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002889- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002890 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002891
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002892- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2893 DOS paths from other platforms.
2894
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002895Tools/Demos
2896-----------
2897
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002898- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2899 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2900 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2901 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2902 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2903 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2904 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2905 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2906 example:
2907
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002908 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2909 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002910
2911 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2912
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002913
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002914Build
2915-----
2916
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002917- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2918 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2919 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002920 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2921
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002922 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2923
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002924- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2925 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2926 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2927 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2928 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2929 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2930 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2931 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2932 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2933
2934- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2935 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2936 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2937 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2938
2939- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2940 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2941
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002942C API
2943-----
2944
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002945- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2946 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002947
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002948- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2949 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2950 tp_as_number pointer.
2951
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002952- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2953 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2954 (SF #681367)
2955
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002956- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2957 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2958 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2959 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002960
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002961Tests
2962-----
2963
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002964- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002965 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2966 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2967 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2968 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2969 pydoc.)
2970
2971- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2972
2973- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002975Windows
2976-------
2977
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002978- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2979 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2980 time).
2981
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002982- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2983 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2984
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002985- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2986 release without strong cryptography.
2987
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002988- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002989 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002990
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002991- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2992 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2993
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002994Mac
2995---
2996
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002997- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2998 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002999
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003000- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3001 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3002 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003003
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003004- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3005 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003006
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003007- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3008 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3009 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3010 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003011
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003012- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003013 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3014 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3015 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003016
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003017
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003019=================================
3020
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003021*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003023Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003025
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003026- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3027
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003028- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3029 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003030 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003031 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003032 a different meaning than before.
3033
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003034- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003035 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003036 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003037
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003038- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003039 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003040 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003041
3042- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3043 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3044 and deallocation.
3045
3046- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3047 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3048
3049- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3050 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3051 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3052 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3053 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3054
3055- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3056 now detected by the garbage collector.
3057
3058- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3059 [SF bug 519621]
3060
3061- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3062 identifier.
3063
3064- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3065 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3066 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3067 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3068 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3069 [SF bug 563060]
3070
3071- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3072 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3073 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3074 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3075 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3076
3077- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3078 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3079 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3080
3081- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3082
3083- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3084 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3085 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3086 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3087 state of the slots would be lost.)
3088
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003089Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003091
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003092- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003093 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3094 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3095 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3096 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003097 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3098 Jython 2.1.
3099
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003100- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003101 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003102 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3103 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3104 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3105 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3106 these, see PEP 302.
3107
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003108- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3109 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3110 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3111
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003112- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3113 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3114 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3115
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003116- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3117 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3118 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3119
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003120- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3121 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3122 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3123 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3124 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3125 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3126 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3127 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3128 releases or implementations.
3129
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003130- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003131 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3132 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003133
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003134- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3135 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3136
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003137- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3138 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3139 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3140
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003141- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3142 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3143
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003144- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3145 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003146 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3147 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003148
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003149- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3150 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3151 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3152 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3153 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3154
3155 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3156 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3157 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3158 pattern.
3159
3160 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3161 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3162 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3163 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3164
3165 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3166 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3167 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3168 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3169 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3170 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3171
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003172- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3173 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3174 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3175 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3176 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3177 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3178 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3179 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003180
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003181- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3182 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3183 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3184 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3185 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003186 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3187 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3188 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3189 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3190 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3191 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3192 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003193
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003194- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3195 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3196
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003197- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3198 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3199 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3200 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3201 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3202 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3203 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3204 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3205 to Zack Weinberg!
3206
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003207- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3208 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3209 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3210 type. This has been fixed now.
3211
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003212- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3213 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3214 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3215
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003216- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3217 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3218 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3219 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3220 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3221 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3222 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3223 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003224 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003225
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003226- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3227 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3228 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003229
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003230- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3231 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3232 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3233 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3234 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3235 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3236 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3237 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003238 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003239 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3240 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3241
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003242- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3243 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3244 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3245 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3246 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3247 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3248 this.)
3249
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003250- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3251 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003252 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003253 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003254 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3255 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003256 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3257 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003258
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003259- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3260 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3261 currently running.
3262
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003263- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3264 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3265 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3266 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3267
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003268- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3269 as directory names.
3270
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003271- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3272 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3273
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003274- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3275 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3276
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003277- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003278 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3279 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003280
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003281- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3282 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3283 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3284 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3285 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3286
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003287- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3288 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3289 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3290 removed.
3291
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003292- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3293 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3294 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3295
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003296- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3297 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3298 to __debug__.
3299
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003300- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3301 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3302 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3303
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003304- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3305 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3306 deprecated now.
3307
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003308- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3309 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3310 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003311
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003312- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3313 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3314 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3315 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3316 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003317
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003318- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3319 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3320
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003321- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3322 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3323 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003324 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003325 is backward compatible.
3326
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003327- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3328 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3329 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3330 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3331 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3332
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003333- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3334 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3335 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3336 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3337 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3338 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003339
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003340- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3341 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3342
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003343- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3344 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3345
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003346- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3347 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3348 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3349 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3350 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3351
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003352- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3353 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3354 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3355
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003356- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003357 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3358
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003359- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3360 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3361 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003362
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003363- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3364 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3365
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003366- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3367 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3368 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3369
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003370- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3371
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003372Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003374
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003375- Added three operators to the operator module:
3376 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3377 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3378 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3379
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003380- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3381
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003382- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3383 archives.
3384
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003385- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3386 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3387 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3388
3389 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3390
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003391- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3392 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3393 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003394 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003395
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003396- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3397 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3398 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3399 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003400 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3401 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3402 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3403 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003404
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003405- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3406 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003407
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003408- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3409
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003410- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3411 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3412
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003413- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3414 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3415 supported.
3416
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003417- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3418
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003419- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3420 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003421
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003422- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3423 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3424
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003425- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3426
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003427- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3428 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3429
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003430- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3431 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3432 functions but callable type objects.
3433
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003434- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003435 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003436 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003437
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003438- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3439 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003440
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003441- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3442 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003443
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003444- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3445 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3446 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3447 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3448
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003449- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3450 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003451
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003452- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3453 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3454 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3455 and __imul__.
3456
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003457- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003458 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3459 is called.
3460
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003461- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3462 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3463 interpreter was compiled.
3464
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003465- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3466 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3467 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003468 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003469 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3470 1, not 2.
3471
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003472- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3473 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3474 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3475 limit.
3476
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003477- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3478 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3479 bug #623464.
3480
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003481- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3482 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3483 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3484 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003486Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003488
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003489- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3490
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003491- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3492 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3493 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3494 with Python 2.3a2.
3495
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003496- os.path exposes getctime.
3497
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003498- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003499 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003500 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003501 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003502 unit tests of floating point results.
3503
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003504- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3505 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3506 has been increased.
3507
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003508- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3509 executed.
3510
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003511- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3512 postinstallation script.
3513
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003514- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3515 test the current module.
3516
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003517- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003518 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3519 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3520 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3521 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3522
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003523- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003524 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003525 Ward's Optik package.
3526
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003527- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3528 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3529 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3530 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3531
3532- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3533 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003534 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003535
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003536- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3537 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3538 shelf are binary pickles.
3539
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003540- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3541 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3542
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003543- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3544 modules are iterators now.
3545
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003546- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3547 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3548 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3549 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3550 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3551 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003552
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003553- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3554 with their entity value.
3555
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003556- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3557
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003558- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3559 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003560
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003561- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3562 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003563 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003564
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003565- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3566 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3567 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3568 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3569 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3570 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3571 main():
3572
3573 import locale
3574 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3575
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003576- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3577 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3578
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003579- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3580 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3581 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3582 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3583 to the new standard.
3584
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003585- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3586 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3587 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3588 an extension to the database.
3589
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003590- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3591 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3592 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3593 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003594 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003595
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003596- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003597 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003598
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003599- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3600 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3601 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3602 bounded integers.
3603
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003604- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3605 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3606 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3607 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3608 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3609 in existence.
3610
3611 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3612 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3613 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3614 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3615 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3616 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3617
3618 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3619 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3620 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3621 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3622
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003623- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3624 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3625 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3626
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003627- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3628
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003629- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3630 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3631 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3632 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3633
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003634- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3635 argument.
3636
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003637- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3638 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3639 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3640 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3641 [SF patch 560794].
3642
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003643- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3644 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3645 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003646 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3647 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3648 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003649
3650- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3651 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003652
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003653- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3654 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3655 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3656 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003657
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003658- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3659 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3660 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3661 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3662 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3663
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003664- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003665
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003666- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3667
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003668- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3669 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3670 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3671 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3672 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3673 identical to None.
3674
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003675- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3676 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3677 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3678 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3679 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3680 results now.
3681
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003682- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3683 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3684
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003685- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3686 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3687 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3688 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3689 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3690 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3691 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3692 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3693
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003694- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3695
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003696- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3697 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3698
3699- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3700 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3701 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3702 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3703 and other systems.
3704
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003705- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3706 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3707 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3708 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 +00003709 work well with these.
3710
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003711- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3712
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003713- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003714 connections.
3715
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003716- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3717 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3718 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3719
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003720- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3721 sets
3722
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003723- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3724 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3725 name.
3726
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003727- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3728 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3729 passed in.
3730
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003731- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003732 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003733 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3734 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003735
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003736- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3737
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003738- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3739
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003740- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3741 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3742 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3743
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003744- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3745 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3746 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3747 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003748 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003749
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003750- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003751 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003752 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003753
3754- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3755 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3756 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3757
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003758- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003759 the value of its expression argument.
3760
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003761- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3762 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3763 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3764
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003765- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3766 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3767 skipstone browser was included.
3768
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003769- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3770 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003774
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003775- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3776 names in addition to accepting file names.
3777
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003778- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3779 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3780 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3781 still used and useful.)
3782
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003783- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3784 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3785 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3786 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003787
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003788- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3789 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3790 the generated binary.
3791
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003792Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003794
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003795- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3796
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003797- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3798 except in the hands of experts.
3799
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003800- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003801 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3802 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3803 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003804
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003805- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3806 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3807 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3808 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3809 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3810 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3811 builds.
3812
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003813- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3814 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3815 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3816 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3817 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3818 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3819 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3820 new type.
3821
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003822- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003823
3824 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3825 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3826 positive infinities.
3827
3828 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3829 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3830 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3831 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3832 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3833 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3834 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3835
3836 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3837
3838 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3839
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003840- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3841 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3842 size of the executable.
3843
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003844- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3845 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3846 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3847 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003848
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003849- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3850
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003851- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3852 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3853 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003854
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003855- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3856 well as Unix.
3857
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003858- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3859 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3860 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3861 modules in the README file for details.
3862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003865
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003866- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3867 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003868 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003869 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003870 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003871
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003872- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3873 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3874 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3875 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3876 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3877 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003878 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003879 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3880 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3881 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3882 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3883 aligned.)
3884
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003885- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3886 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3887 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3888
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003889- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3890 level.
3891
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003892- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3893 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3894 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3895 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3896 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3897
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003898- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3899 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3900 code.
3901
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003902- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3903 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3904 adjusting for negative indices.
3905
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003906- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3907 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3908 object.
3909
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003910- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3911 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3912 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3913
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003914- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3915 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003916
3917- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3918
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003919- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3920 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3921 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3922 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3923
3924- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3925
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003926- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003927
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003928- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003929 without going through the buffer API.
3930
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003932
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003933- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3934 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3935 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3936 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003938- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3939 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3940
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003941- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003942 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3943
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003944New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003946
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003947- OpenVMS is now supported.
3948
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003949- AtheOS is now supported.
3950
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003951- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3952
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003953- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3954
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003955Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----
3957
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003958- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3959 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3960 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003961
3962Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003965- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3966 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3967 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3968 bugs.
3969 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003970 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003971 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3972 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003973 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003974
3975- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003976 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003977
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003978- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3979 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3980
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003981- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3982 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003983 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003984 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3985
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003986- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3987 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3988 use files" uninstall option).
3989
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003990- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3991
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003992- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3993 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3994
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003995- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3996 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3997 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3998
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003999- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4000 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4001 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4002 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4003 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004004 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4005 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4006 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004007
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004008- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004009 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004010 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4011 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4012 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4013 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4014 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4015 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4016 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4017 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4018 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4019 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4020 work around.
4021
4022- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4023 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4024 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4025 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4026 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4027 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4028 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4029 specified with O_CREAT too).
4030
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004031Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032----
4033
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004034- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004035
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004036- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4037 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4038 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4039
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004040- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4041 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4042 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4043
4044- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4045 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4046 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4047 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4048 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4049 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4050 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4051 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004052
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004053- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4054 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4055 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004056
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004057- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4058 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4059 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4060 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4061 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004062
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004063- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4064 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4065 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004066
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004067- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4068 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004069
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004070- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4071 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4072 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4073 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4074 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004075
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004076- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4077 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4078 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4079
4080- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4081 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4082 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004083
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004084- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4085 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4086 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4087 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004088 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004089
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004090- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4091 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004092
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004093- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4094 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004095
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004096- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004097 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004098 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4099 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004100
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004101
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004102What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004103===============================
4104
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4106
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004107Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004109
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004110- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4111 with a custom metaclass.
4112
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004113Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004115
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004116- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4117 are proxies.
4118
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004119Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004121
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004122- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4123 very short strings.
4124
4125- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4126 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4127 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4128 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4129 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4130
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004131Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004133
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004134- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4135 close or delete time).
4136
4137- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4138 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4139
4140- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4141
4142- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004143 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004144
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004147
4148Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004150
4151C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004153
4154New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004156
4157Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159
4160Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004163- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4164
4165- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4166 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4167
4168- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4169 deleted at process exit time.
4170
4171- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4172 in backslash.
4173
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004174Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004176
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004177- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4178 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4179 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4180
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004181
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004182What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004183===========================
4184
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4186
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004187Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004189
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004190- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4191 been extensively updated. See
4192
4193 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4194
4195 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4196
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004197- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4198 deleted!
4199
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004200- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4201 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4202 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4203 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4204 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4205
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004206- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4207
4208 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4209 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4210
4211 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4212 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4213 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4214 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4215 supported anyway.
4216
4217 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4218 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4219
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004220- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4221 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4222 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4223 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4224 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004225
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004226- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4227 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4228 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4229
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004230Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004232
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004233- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4234 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4235 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4236 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4237 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4238 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004239 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4240 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4241 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4242 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004243
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004244- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4245 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4246 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4247
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004248Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004250
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004251- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4252
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004253Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004255
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004256- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4257 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4258 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4259 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4260 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4261 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4262
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004263- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4264
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004265- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4266
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004267- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4268
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004269- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4270 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4271 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4272
4273- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4274
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004275Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004277
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004278- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4279 off a search on Google.
4280
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004281Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004283
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004284- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4285 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4286 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4287 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4288 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4289 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4290 other platforms should do likewise.
4291
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004292- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4293 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4294 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4295
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004298
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004299- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4300 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4301 producing key-value pairs.
4302
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004303- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004304 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004305 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4306 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4307 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4308 previously went unchallenged.
4309
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004312
4313Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004315
4316Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004318
4319Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004321
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004322- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4323 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004324
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004325- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4326 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4327 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4328 home.
4329
4330
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004331What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332===========================
4333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004339- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4340 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004341
4342 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004343 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004344
4345 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4346 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004347 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004348 This needs to be documented.
4349
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004350- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4351 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4352
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004353- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4354 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4355 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4356
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004357- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4358 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4359
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004360- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4361 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4362 class forbids it).
4363
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004364- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4365 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4366 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4367
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004368- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4369
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004370Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004372
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004373- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4374 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004375 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004376
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004377- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4378 (like 1 + '').
4379
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004380Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004383- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4384 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4385 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4386 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004387 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004388 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4389
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004390- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4391 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4392 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4393 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4394
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004395- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4396 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004397 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4398 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4399 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004400
4401- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4402 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004403
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004404- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4405 bytes on its input.
4406
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004407Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004409
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004410- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004411 convenience function.
4412
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004413- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4414 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4415 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004416 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4417 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4418 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4419 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4420 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4421 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004422
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004423- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4424 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4425 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4426 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4427
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004428- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4429 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4430 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4431
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004432- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4433 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4434 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4435 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4436
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004437- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4438 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004440 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4441 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4442 new -l and -e options.
4443
4444- statcache is now deprecated.
4445
4446- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4447 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004449 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4450 time properly taken into account.
4451
4452- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4453 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4454 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4455 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4456
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004457Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459
4460Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004462
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004463- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4464 is built with libdb3 if available.
4465
4466- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4467
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004468C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004471- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4472 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4473 PySequence_Size().
4474
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004475- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4476
4477- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4478 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4479 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4480
4481- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4482 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4483
4484- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4485 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4486
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004487New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004489
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004490- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4491 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4492
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004493- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4494 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4495
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004496- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4497
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004500
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004501- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4502 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004504Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004506
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004507Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004509
4510- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4511 removed completely in the next release.
4512
4513- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4514 OSX.
4515
4516- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4517 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4518
4519- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4520
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004521
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004522What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004523===========================
4524
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4526
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004527Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004529
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004530- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004531 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004532 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004533 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4534 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004535 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4536 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004537 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4538 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004539
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004540- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4541 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4542
4543- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4544 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4545
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004546Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004548
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004549- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4550 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4551 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4552 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4553 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4554 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4555 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4556 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4557
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004558- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4559 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4560 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4561 example).
4562
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004563- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004564 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004565 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004566 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004567
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004568- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4569 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4570 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004571 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004572
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004573- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4574 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4575 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4576 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4577 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4578 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4579
4580 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4581
4582 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4583
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004584Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004586
4587- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4588
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004589- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4590
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004591- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4592 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004593
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004594- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4595 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4596 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4597 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4598 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4599 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004600 attributes.
4601
4602- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4603 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4604 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004605
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004606- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4607 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4608 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004609
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004610- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4611 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4612 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004613 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4614 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4615
4616- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4617 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004618
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004619Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004621
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004622- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4623 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4624
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004625- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4626 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4627 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4628 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4629
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004630- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4631 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4632 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4633 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4634
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004635 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4636 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4637 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4638 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4639 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4640 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4641 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4642 without losing information).
4643
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004644- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004645 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4646 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4647 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4648 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4649 module).
4650
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004651 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004652 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4653 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4654 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4655 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004656
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004657- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004658 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4659 encoding.
4660
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004661- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4662 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004665 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4666
4667- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4668 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4669 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4670 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4671
4672- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4673
4674- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4675 ON, and OFF.
4676
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004677- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4678 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4679
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004680Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004682
4683- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4684 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4685 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004686
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004687- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4688 been added: -X and -E.
4689
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004692
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004693- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4694 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4695
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004696C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004698
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004699- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4700 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4701 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4702 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4703 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4704
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004705- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4706 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4707 as long) arguments.
4708
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004709- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4710 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4711 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4712 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4713 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4714 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4715
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004716- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4717 input.
4718
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004719New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004721
4722Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004724
4725Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004727
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004728- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4729 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4730 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4731
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004732- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4733 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4734 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004735 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4738 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4739 import signal
4740 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004741
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004743 while 1:
4744 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004746 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4747 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4748 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4749 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004750
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004752What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4753===========================
4754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4756
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004757Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004759
4760- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4761 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4762 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4763
4764- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4765 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4766 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4767 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4768 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4769 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4770 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004771
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004772- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004773 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004774 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4775 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4776 associate a docstring with a property.
4777
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004778- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4779 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4780 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4781 other built-in object types.
4782
4783- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4784 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4785 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4786 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4787 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4788
4789- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4790 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4791
4792- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4793 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004794 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004795 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4796 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4797 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4798 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4799 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4800
4801- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4802 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4803 class.
4804
4805- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4806 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4807 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4808 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4809
4810- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4811 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4812 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4813 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4814
4815- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4816 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4817
4818- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4819 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4820 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4821 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4822 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004823 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004824 with the same value as s.
4825
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004826- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4827
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004828Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004830
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004831- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4832
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004833- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4834 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4835 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4836 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4837 objects.
4838
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004839- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4840 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004841 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4842 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4843
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004844- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4845 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4846 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4847
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004848Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004850
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004851- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4852 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4853 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4854 by the instances.
4855
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004856- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4857 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4858 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4859
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004860- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4861 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4862 before the entire comparison is complete.
4863
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004864- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4865 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4866 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4867
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004868- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4869 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4870 getwriter().
4871
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004872- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4873 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4874
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004875- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004876 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4877 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4878
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004879- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4880 iterable object.
4881
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004882- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4883 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004884
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004885- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4886 authentication.
4887
4888- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4889 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004890
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004891- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004892 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4893 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4894 a sample driver.)
4895
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004896Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004898
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004899- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4900 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4901 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4902 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4903 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4904 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4905 kernel has large file support.
4906
4907- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4908 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4909 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4910 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4911 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4912
4913- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4914 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4915 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4916
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004917C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004919
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004920- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4921 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4922
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004923New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004925
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004926- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4927 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4928
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004929Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004931
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004932- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4933 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4934 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4935 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4936 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4937
4938- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4939 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4940 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4941 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4942
4943- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4944 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4945
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004946Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004948
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004949- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004950 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4951 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004952
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004953
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004954What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4955===========================
4956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4958
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004959Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004961
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004962- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4963 big to represent as a C double.
4964
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004965- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4966 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4967 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4968 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4969 restriction).
4970
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004971- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4972 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4973 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4974 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4975 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4976
4977 >>> dir([])
4978 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4979 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4980 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4981 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4982 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4983 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4984 'reverse', 'sort']
4985
4986 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004989 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4990 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4991 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4992 OverflowError exception.
4993
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004994- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004995 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004996 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4997 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4998 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4999 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5000 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005001 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5003 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5004
5005 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5006 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5007 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5008 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005009
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005010- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005011 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5012 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5013 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5014 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5015 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5016 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5017 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5018 once it is created.
5019
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005020- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5021 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5022 (key, value) pairs.
5023
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005024- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005025 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5026 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5027
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005028- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5029 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5030 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5031 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5032 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005033
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005034- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005035 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5036 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5037
5038 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5039
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005040- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005041 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5042
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005043Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005045
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005046- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005047 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5048 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005049
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005050- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5051 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5052 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5053 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5054 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5055 in this area anymore).
5056
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005057- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5058 threading.Timer.
5059
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005060- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5061 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5062
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005063- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005064 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005066- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005067 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5068 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5069 converted to Python longs.
5070
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005071- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005072 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5073
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005074- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5075 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5076 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5077
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005078Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005080
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005081- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5082 division operators as per PEP 238.
5083
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005084Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005086
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005087- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5088 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5089 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5090 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5091
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005092C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005094
5095- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005096
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005097- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5098 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005099 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005100
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5102 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005103 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005105
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005106- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005107 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5108 module:
5109
5110 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005111
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005112 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5113 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005114
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005115 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5116 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005117
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005118 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5119
5120 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005122- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005123 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5124 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5125 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005126
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005127New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005129
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005130- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5131 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5132 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5133 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5134 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005135
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005138
5139Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005141
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005142- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5143 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5144 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5145 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005146 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5147 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5148 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5149 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5150 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005151
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005152- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005153 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5154
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005155
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005156What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5157===========================
5158
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5160
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005161Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005163
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005164- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5165 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5166
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005167- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5168 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5169 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005170
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005171- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5172 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5173 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5174 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005175
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005176- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5177
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005179
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005180Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005182
5183- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005184 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005185 the module docstring for details.
5186
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005187Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005189
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005190- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005191 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5192 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5193 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005194
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005195- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5196 Nick Mathewson.
5197
5198Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005200
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005201- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5202 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5203 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5204 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5205 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5206 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5207 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5208 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5209
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005210- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5211 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5212 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5213 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5214
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005215- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5216 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5217 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5218 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5219 come a long way).
5220
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005221- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5222 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5223 write filters for these warnings).
5224
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005225- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5226 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5227 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5228 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5229 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5230
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005231- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5232 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5233 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5234 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5235 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5236 older distribution.
5237
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005238Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005239-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005240
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005241- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5242 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005243 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005244
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005245- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5246 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5247 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5248
5249- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5250
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005251- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5252
5253- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5254
5255- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5256
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005258
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005259- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5260
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005261New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005263
5264C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005266
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005267- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5268 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5269 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5270 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5271 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5272 against buffer overruns.
5273
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005274- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005275 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5276 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005277 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5278 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5279 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5280
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005281- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5282 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5283 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5284 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5285 deprecated.
5286
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005287Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005289
5290- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5291 relevant is found.
5292
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005293
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005294What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005295===========================
5296
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5298
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005299Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005301
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005302- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5303 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5304 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5305 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5306 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5307 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5308 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5309 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005310 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005311 repaired.
5312
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005313- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005314 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005315 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5316 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5317 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5318 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5319 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5320 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5321 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5322 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5323
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005324- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5325 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5326 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5327 leading BMO character).
5328
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005329- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5330 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5331 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5332
5333 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5334 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5335 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005336
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005337 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5338 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5339 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5340 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5341 for various simple to use conversions.
5342
5343 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5344 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5347 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5348 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5349 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5350 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5351 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5352 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5353 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5354 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5355 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5356 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5357 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5358 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5359 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5360 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005361
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005362- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5363 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5364 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005365 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005366 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005367
5368 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005369 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5370 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5371 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5372 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5373 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005374 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5375 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005376
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005377 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5378 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5379 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005380 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005381
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005382- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5383 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5384 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5385 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5386 floating arithmetic,
5387
5388 x = 9007199254740992.0
5389 print long(x)
5390
5391 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5392 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5393 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5394 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5395 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5396 functions are of good quality).
5397
5398 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5399 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5400 algorithms to break.
5401
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005402- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5403 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5404 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5405 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5406 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5407 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5408 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5409 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5410 order.
5411
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005412- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5413 operation along the most common code paths.
5414
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005415- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5416 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5417
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005418- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5419 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5420 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5421 {}.update(UserDict())
5422
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005423- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5424 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5425 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5426 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5427 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5428 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5429 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5430 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5431
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005432- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005433 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005435 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005436 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5437 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005438 join() method of strings
5439 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005440 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5441 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005443 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005444
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005445- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5446 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5447
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005448- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5449 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5450
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005451- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5452 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5453 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5454 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5455
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005456- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5457 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005458 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005459 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5460 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005461
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005462- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5463
5464
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005465Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005466-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005467
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005468- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005469 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005470 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5471 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5472
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005473- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5474 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5475
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005476- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5477 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5478 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5479 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5480
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005481- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5482 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5483 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5484
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005485- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5486
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005487- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5488
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005489- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5490 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5491 that are still imported into string.py).
5492
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005493- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5494
5495- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5496 Now it does.
5497
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005498- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5499
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005500- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5501 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5502 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5503 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5504 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005505 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5506 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005507
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005508- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5509 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5510 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5511 'help(object)'.
5512
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005513Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005514-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005515
5516- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005517 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005518 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5519 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5520
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005521- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005522 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5523 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005524
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005526-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005527
5528- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5529 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530
5531----
5532
5533**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**