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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate?
8===========================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +000013- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
14 by sys.setcheckinterval().
15
Tim Peters2e7e7df2003-07-04 04:40:45 +000016- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
17 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
18 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
19 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
20 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
21 Python exception ::
22
23 thread.error: can't start new thread
24
25 is raised now.
26
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +000027Extension modules
28-----------------
29
30- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
31 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
32
33- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
34
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +000035- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
36
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +000037- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
38 contained within the _strptime module.
39
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +000040Library
41-------
42
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +000043- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
44 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
45 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
46 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
47 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
48 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
49 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
50 or Tester().
51
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +000052- Closing a dumbdbm database more than once is now harmless (it used to
53 raise a nuisance exception on the second close).
54
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +000055- It's vital that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the
56 on-disk data and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent
57 states. dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close
58 the database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit()
Tim Peters03204642003-07-13 02:37:05 +000059 could prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__()
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +000060 to get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
61 has been repaired.
62
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +000063- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
64 weren't before was an oversight.
65
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +000066- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
67 when there are no lines.
68
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +000069- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
70 which could occur with Tk 8.4
71
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +000072Tools/Demos
73-----------
74
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +000075- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
76
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +000077Build
78-----
79
80C API
81-----
82
83Windows
84-------
85
86Mac
87---
88
89
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000090What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
91================================
92
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +000093*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000094
95Core and builtins
96-----------------
97
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +000098- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
99 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
100 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
101 with the -i option.
102
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000103- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
104 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
105
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000106- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
107 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
108
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000109- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
110 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
111 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
112 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
113 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
114 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
115 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
116 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
117 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
118 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
119 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
120 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
121 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000122
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000123- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
124 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
125 embedded in a lambda expression.
126
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000127- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
128 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
129 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
130 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
131 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
132
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000133- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
134 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
135 matches the restriction on classic classes.
136
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000137- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
138 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
139
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000140- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
141 It's writable again.
142
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000143- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
144 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
145 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000146 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000147
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000148- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
149 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
150 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
151
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000152Extension modules
153-----------------
154
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000155- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
156 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
157
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000158- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
159 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
160 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
161 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
162
163- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
164 collection.
165
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000166- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
167 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
168 unique within a single program run.
169
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000170- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
171 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
172
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000173- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
174 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
175
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000176- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
177 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000178
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000179- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
180
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000181- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
182 Fixes SF bug #730685.
183
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000184- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
185 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
186 for many BSD-derived systems.
187
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000188
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000189Library
190-------
191
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000192- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
193 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
194 primary ones:
195
196 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
197 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
198 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
199
200 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
201 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
202 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
203 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
204 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
205 framework features (which doctest lacks).
206
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000207- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
208 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
209 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
210 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
211 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
212 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
213 argument.
214
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000215- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
216 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
217 in the archive.
218
219- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
220 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
221
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000222- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
223 569574).
224
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000225- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
226 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
227 no more.
228
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000229- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
230 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
231 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
232 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
233 code coverage.
234
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000235- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
236 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
237 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000238 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
239 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000240
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000241- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
242 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
243 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000244 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000245
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000246- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
247
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000248- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
249 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
250 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
251 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
252
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000253- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
254 handling.
255
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000256- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
257 __doc__ of data descriptors.
258
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000259- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
260 in socket.py.
261
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000262- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
263
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000264- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
265 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
266 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
267 opener with proxy support.
268
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000269- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
270
271- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
272
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000273Tools/Demos
274-----------
275
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000276- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
277
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000278- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
279
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000280- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
281 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000282
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000283- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
284 files.
285
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000286Build
287-----
288
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000289- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000290 different root directory.
291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000292C API
293-----
294
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000295- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
296 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
297 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
298 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
299 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
300 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
301 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
302 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
303 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
304 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
305
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000306- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
307 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
308 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
309 from Python.
310
311
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000312New platforms
313-------------
314
315None this time.
316
317Tests
318-----
319
320- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
321 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
322
323Windows
324-------
325
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000326- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
327
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000328- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
329 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
330 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
331 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
332 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
333 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
334 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
335 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
336 that's what it's for.
337
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000338Mac
339---
340
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000341- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
342 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
343 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
344 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000345- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
346 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
347- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000348
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000349SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
350------------------------------------
351
352430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
353598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
354622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
355661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
356683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
357697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
358713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
359724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
360727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
361729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
362730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
363731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
364732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
365733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
366735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
367740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
368744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
369745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
370747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
371749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
372751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
373753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
374755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
375757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
376760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
377
378
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000379What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
380================================
381
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000382*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000383
384Core and builtins
385-----------------
386
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000387- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
388 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
389
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000390- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
391 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
392 and cannot be strings).
393
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000394- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
395 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
396 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
397 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
398
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000399- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
400 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
401 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
402 Python itself.
403
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000404- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
405 the referenced object, if it has one.
406
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000407- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
408 the thread started at
409 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
410
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000411- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
412 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
413 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
414 placed on a list index.
415
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000416- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
417 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
418 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
419 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
420
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000421- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
422 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
423 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
424 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
425 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
426 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
427 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
428
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000429- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
430 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
431 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
432 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
433 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
434
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000435- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
436 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000437
438- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
439 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
440 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
441 #693195.)
442
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000443- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
444 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000445
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000446- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000447 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000448 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
449 interpreter executions, would fail.
450
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000451- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000452 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000453 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000454
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000455Extension modules
456-----------------
457
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000458- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
459 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
460 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
461 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
462
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000463- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
464 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
465
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000466- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
467 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
468 and Greg Chapman.)
469
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000470- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
471 recursively.
472
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000473- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000474 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
475 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
476 leaks.
477
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000478- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
479
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000480- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
481 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
482 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
483 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
484 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
485 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
486 #705836.
487
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000488- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000489 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
490
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000491- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
492 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
493 See SF bug #692416.
494
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000495- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
496 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
497
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000498- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
499 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
500 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000501
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000502- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000503 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
504 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
505
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000506- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
507 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
508 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
509 timeouts to work properly.
510
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000511Library
512-------
513
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000514- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
515 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
516 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
517 future release.
518
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000519- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
520 for querying platform dependent features.
521
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000522- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000523
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000524- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
525 pickle protocol versions.
526
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000527- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
528 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
529 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
530
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000531- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
532
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000533- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
534 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
535 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
536 modules.
537
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000538- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
539 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
540 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
541
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000542- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
543 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
544
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000545- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
546 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
547 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
548
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000549- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000550 MS Office extensions.
551
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000552- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
553 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
554
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000555- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
556 execution speed of expressions and statements.
557
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000558- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
559 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
560 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
561 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
562 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
563 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
564
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000565- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
566 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
567 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000568
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000569- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
570 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
571 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
572
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000573- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
574
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000575- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
576 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
577 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
578
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000579Tools/Demos
580-----------
581
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000582- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
583 See the module docstring for details.
584
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000585Build
586-----
587
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000588- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
589 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000590
591C API
592-----
593
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000594- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
595
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000596- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
597 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
598 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
599
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000600- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
601 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000602
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000603 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
604 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
605 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000606
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000607- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000608 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
609
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000610- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
611 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
612 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000613
614New platforms
615-------------
616
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000617None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000618
619Tests
620-----
621
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000622- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
623 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000624
625Windows
626-------
627
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000628- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
629 function.
630
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000631- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
632 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000633
634Mac
635---
636
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000637- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
638 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000639
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000640- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
641 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000642
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000643- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
644 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
645 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000646
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000647- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000648 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
649 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000650
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000651- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
652 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000653
654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000655What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
656=================================
657
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000658*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000659
660Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000661-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000662
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000663- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
664 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
665 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
666
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000667- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
668 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
669 (SF patch #664376.)
670
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000671- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
672 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
673 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
674 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
675 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
676 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000677 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000678
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000679- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
680 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
681 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
682 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000683 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000684
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000685- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
686 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
687 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
688 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
689 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
690 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
691 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
692 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
693 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
694 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
695 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
696
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000697- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
698 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
699 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
700 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
701 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
702 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
703
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000704- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
705 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
706
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000707- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
708 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
709 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
710 case.)
711
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000712- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
713 passed as unicode strings.
714
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000715- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
716 See SF bug #683467.
717
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000718- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
719 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
720
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000721- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
722
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000723- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
724
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000725- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
726 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
727 arguments.
728
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000729- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
730 See SF bug #667147.
731
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000732- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000733 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000734 See SF bug #676155.
735
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000736- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000737 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000738 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
739 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
740 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
741 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
742 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
743 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000744
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000745Extension modules
746-----------------
747
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000748- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
749 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
750 tp_as_number pointer.
751
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000752- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
753 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
754 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
755 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
756 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
757
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000758- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
759
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000760- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
761
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000762- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000763 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000764 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
765 patch #678531.)
766
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000767- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
768 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
769
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000770- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
771 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
772
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000773- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
774
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000775- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
776 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
777 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
778
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000779- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
780
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000781- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
782 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
783
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000784- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000785
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000786- datetime changes:
787
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000788 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
789
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000790 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
791 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
792 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
793 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
794 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
795 now.
796
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000797 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000798 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
799 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000800
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000801 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000802 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000803 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
804 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
805 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
806 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000807
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000808 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
809 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
810 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000811 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
812
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000813 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
814 by a later example coded by Guido.
815
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000816 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000817 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
818 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
819 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000820 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
821 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
822
823 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
824 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
825 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
826 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
827 tzinfo subclass instance.
828
829 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
830 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
831 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
832 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
833 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
834 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
835 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
836 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000837
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000838 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
839 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
840 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
841 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
842 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000843 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
844
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000845 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000846
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000847 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
848 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
849 as a naive datetime object.
850
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000851 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
852 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
853 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
854
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000855 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
856 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
857 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
858 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
859 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
860 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
861 comparison.
862
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000863 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
864 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
865 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
866 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000867 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000868
869 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000870
871 and ::
872
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000873 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
874
875 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
876 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
877 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
878 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
879
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000880 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
881 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
882 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
883 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
884 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
885
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000886 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
887 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000888 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
889 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000890
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000891Library
892-------
893
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000894- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
895 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
896
897- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
898 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
899 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
900 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
901 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
902 See PEP 307 for details.
903
904- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
905 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
906
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000907- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
908 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000909 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000910 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
911 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000912 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000913
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000914- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
915 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
916
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000917- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
918 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
919 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
920
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000921- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
922
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000923- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
924 exception.
925
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000926- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
927 class.
928
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000929- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
930 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
931 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
932
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000933- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
934 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
935
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000936- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000937 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
938 See SF bug #659228.
939
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000940- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
941 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
942 See SF patch #651082.
943
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000944- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000945
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000946- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
947 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
948
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000949- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000950 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000951
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000952- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
953 DOS paths from other platforms.
954
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000955Tools/Demos
956-----------
957
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000958- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
959 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
960 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
961 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
962 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
963 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
964 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
965 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
966 example:
967
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000968 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
969 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000970
971 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
972
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000973
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000974Build
975-----
976
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000977- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
978 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
979 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000980 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
981
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000982 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
983
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000984- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
985 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
986 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
987 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
988 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
989 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
990 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
991 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
992 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
993
994- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
995 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
996 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
997 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
998
999- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1000 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001002C API
1003-----
1004
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001005- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1006 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001007
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001008- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1009 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1010 tp_as_number pointer.
1011
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001012- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1013 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1014 (SF #681367)
1015
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001016- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1017 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1018 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1019 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001021Tests
1022-----
1023
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001024- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001025 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1026 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1027 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1028 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1029 pydoc.)
1030
1031- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1032
1033- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001034
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001035Windows
1036-------
1037
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001038- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1039 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1040 time).
1041
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001042- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1043 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1044
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001045- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1046 release without strong cryptography.
1047
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001048- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001049 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001050
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001051- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1052 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1053
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001054Mac
1055---
1056
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001057- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1058 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001059
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001060- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1061 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1062 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001063
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001064- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1065 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001066
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001067- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1068 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1069 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1070 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001071
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001072- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001073 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1074 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1075 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001076
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001078What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001079=================================
1080
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001081*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001083Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001084--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001085
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001086- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1087
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001088- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1089 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001090 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001091 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001092 a different meaning than before.
1093
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001094- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001095 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001096 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001097
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001098- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001099 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001100 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001101
1102- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1103 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1104 and deallocation.
1105
1106- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1107 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1108
1109- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1110 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1111 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1112 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1113 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1114
1115- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1116 now detected by the garbage collector.
1117
1118- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1119 [SF bug 519621]
1120
1121- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1122 identifier.
1123
1124- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1125 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1126 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1127 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1128 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1129 [SF bug 563060]
1130
1131- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1132 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1133 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1134 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1135 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1136
1137- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1138 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1139 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1140
1141- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1142
1143- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1144 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1145 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1146 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1147 state of the slots would be lost.)
1148
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001149Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001150-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001151
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001152- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001153 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1154 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1155 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1156 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001157 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1158 Jython 2.1.
1159
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001160- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001161 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001162 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1163 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1164 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1165 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1166 these, see PEP 302.
1167
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001168- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1169 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1170 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1171
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001172- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1173 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1174 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1175
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001176- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1177 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1178 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1179
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001180- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1181 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1182 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1183 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1184 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1185 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1186 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1187 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1188 releases or implementations.
1189
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001190- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001191 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1192 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001193
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001194- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1195 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1196
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001197- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1198 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1199 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1200
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001201- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1202 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1203
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001204- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1205 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001206 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1207 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001208
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001209- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1210 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1211 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1212 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1213 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1214
1215 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1216 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1217 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1218 pattern.
1219
1220 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1221 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1222 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1223 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1224
1225 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1226 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1227 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1228 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1229 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1230 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1231
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001232- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1233 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1234 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1235 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1236 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1237 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1238 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1239 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001240
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001241- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1242 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1243 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1244 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1245 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001246 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1247 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1248 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1249 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1250 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1251 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1252 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001253
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001254- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1255 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1256
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001257- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1258 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1259 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1260 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1261 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1262 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1263 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1264 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1265 to Zack Weinberg!
1266
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001267- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1268 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1269 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1270 type. This has been fixed now.
1271
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001272- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1273 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1274 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1275
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001276- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1277 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1278 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1279 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1280 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1281 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1282 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1283 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001284 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001285
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001286- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1287 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1288 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001289
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001290- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1291 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1292 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1293 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1294 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1295 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1296 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1297 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001298 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001299 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1300 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1301
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001302- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1303 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1304 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1305 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1306 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1307 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1308 this.)
1309
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001310- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1311 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001312 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001313 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001314 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1315 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001316 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1317 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001318
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001319- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1320 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1321 currently running.
1322
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001323- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1324 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1325 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1326 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1327
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001328- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1329 as directory names.
1330
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001331- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1332 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1333
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001334- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1335 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1336
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001337- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001338 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1339 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001340
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001341- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1342 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1343 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1344 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1345 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1346
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001347- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1348 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1349 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1350 removed.
1351
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001352- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1353 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1354 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1355
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001356- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1357 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1358 to __debug__.
1359
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001360- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1361 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1362 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1363
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001364- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1365 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1366 deprecated now.
1367
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001368- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1369 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1370 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001371
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001372- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1373 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1374 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1375 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1376 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001377
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001378- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1379 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1380
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001381- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1382 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1383 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001384 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001385 is backward compatible.
1386
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001387- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1388 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1389 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1390 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1391 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1392
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001393- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1394 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1395 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1396 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1397 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1398 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001399
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001400- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1401 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1402
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001403- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1404 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1405
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001406- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1407 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1408 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1409 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1410 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1411
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001412- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1413 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1414 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1415
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001416- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001417 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1418
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001419- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1420 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1421 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001422
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001423- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1424 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1425
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001426- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1427 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1428 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1429
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001430- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001432Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001433-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001434
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001435- Added three operators to the operator module:
1436 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1437 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1438 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1439
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001440- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1441
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001442- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1443 archives.
1444
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001445- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1446 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1447 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1448
1449 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1450
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001451- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1452 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1453 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001454 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001455
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001456- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1457 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1458 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1459 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001460 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1461 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1462 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1463 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001464
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001465- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1466 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001467
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001468- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1469
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001470- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1471 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1472
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001473- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1474 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1475 supported.
1476
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001477- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1478
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001479- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1480 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001481
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001482- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1483 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1484
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001485- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1486
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001487- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1488 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1489
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001490- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1491 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1492 functions but callable type objects.
1493
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001494- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001495 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001496 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001497
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001498- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1499 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001500
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001501- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1502 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001503
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001504- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1505 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1506 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1507 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1508
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001509- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1510 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001511
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001512- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1513 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1514 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1515 and __imul__.
1516
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001517- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001518 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1519 is called.
1520
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001521- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1522 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1523 interpreter was compiled.
1524
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001525- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1526 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1527 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001528 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001529 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1530 1, not 2.
1531
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001532- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1533 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1534 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1535 limit.
1536
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001537- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1538 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1539 bug #623464.
1540
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001541- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1542 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1543 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1544 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1545
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001546Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001547-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001548
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001549- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1550
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001551- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1552 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1553 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1554 with Python 2.3a2.
1555
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001556- os.path exposes getctime.
1557
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001558- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001559 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001560 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001561 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001562 unit tests of floating point results.
1563
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001564- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1565 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1566 has been increased.
1567
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001568- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1569 executed.
1570
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001571- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1572 postinstallation script.
1573
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001574- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1575 test the current module.
1576
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001577- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001578 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1579 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1580 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1581 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1582
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001583- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001584 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001585 Ward's Optik package.
1586
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001587- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1588 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1589 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1590 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1591
1592- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1593 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001594 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001595
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001596- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1597 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1598 shelf are binary pickles.
1599
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001600- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1601 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1602
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001603- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1604 modules are iterators now.
1605
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001606- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1607 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1608 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1609 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1610 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1611 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001612
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001613- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1614 with their entity value.
1615
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001616- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1617
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001618- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1619 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001620
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001621- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1622 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001623 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001624
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001625- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1626 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1627 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1628 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1629 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1630 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1631 main():
1632
1633 import locale
1634 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1635
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001636- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1637 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1638
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001639- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1640 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1641 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1642 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1643 to the new standard.
1644
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001645- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1646 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1647 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1648 an extension to the database.
1649
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001650- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1651 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1652 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1653 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001654 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001655
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001656- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001657 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001658
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001659- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1660 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1661 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1662 bounded integers.
1663
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001664- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1665 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1666 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1667 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1668 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1669 in existence.
1670
1671 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1672 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1673 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1674 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1675 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1676 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1677
1678 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1679 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1680 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1681 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1682
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001683- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1684 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1685 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1686
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001687- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1688
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001689- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1690 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1691 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1692 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1693
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001694- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1695 argument.
1696
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001697- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1698 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1699 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1700 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1701 [SF patch 560794].
1702
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001703- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1704 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1705 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001706 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1707 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1708 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001709
1710- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1711 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001712
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001713- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1714 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1715 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1716 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001717
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001718- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1719 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1720 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1721 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1722 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1723
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001724- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001725
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001726- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1727
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001728- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1729 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1730 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1731 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1732 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1733 identical to None.
1734
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001735- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1736 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1737 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1738 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1739 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1740 results now.
1741
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001742- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1743 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1744
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001745- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1746 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1747 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1748 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1749 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1750 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1751 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1752 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1753
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001754- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1755
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001756- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1757 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1758
1759- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1760 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1761 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1762 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1763 and other systems.
1764
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001765- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1766 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1767 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1768 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 +00001769 work well with these.
1770
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001771- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1772
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001773- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001774 connections.
1775
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001776- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1777 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1778 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1779
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001780- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1781 sets
1782
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001783- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1784 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1785 name.
1786
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001787- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1788 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1789 passed in.
1790
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001791- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001792 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001793 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1794 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001795
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001796- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1797
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001798- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1799
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001800- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1801 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1802 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1803
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001804- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1805 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1806 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1807 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001808 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001809
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001810- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001811 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001812 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001813
1814- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1815 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1816 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1817
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001818- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001819 the value of its expression argument.
1820
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001821- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1822 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1823 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1824
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001825- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1826 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1827 skipstone browser was included.
1828
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001829- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1830 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001832Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001834
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001835- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1836 names in addition to accepting file names.
1837
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001838- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1839 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1840 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1841 still used and useful.)
1842
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001843- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1844 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1845 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1846 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001847
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001848- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1849 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1850 the generated binary.
1851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001852Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001853-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001854
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001855- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1856
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001857- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1858 except in the hands of experts.
1859
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001860- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001861 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1862 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1863 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001864
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001865- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1866 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1867 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1868 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1869 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1870 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1871 builds.
1872
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001873- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1874 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1875 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1876 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1877 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1878 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1879 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1880 new type.
1881
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001882- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001883
1884 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1885 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1886 positive infinities.
1887
1888 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1889 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1890 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1891 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1892 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1893 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1894 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1895
1896 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1897
1898 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1899
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001900- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1901 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1902 size of the executable.
1903
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001904- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1905 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1906 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1907 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001908
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001909- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1910
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001911- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1912 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1913 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001914
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001915- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1916 well as Unix.
1917
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001918- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1919 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1920 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1921 modules in the README file for details.
1922
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001923C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001924-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001925
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001926- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1927 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001928 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001929 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001930 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001931
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001932- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1933 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1934 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1935 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1936 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1937 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001938 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001939 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1940 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1941 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1942 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1943 aligned.)
1944
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001945- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1946 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1947 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1948
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001949- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1950 level.
1951
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001952- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1953 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1954 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1955 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1956 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1957
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001958- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1959 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1960 code.
1961
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001962- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1963 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1964 adjusting for negative indices.
1965
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001966- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1967 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1968 object.
1969
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001970- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1971 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1972 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1973
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001974- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1975 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001976
1977- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1978
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001979- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1980 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1981 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1982 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1983
1984- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1985
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001986- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001987
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001988- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001989 without going through the buffer API.
1990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001991- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001992
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001993- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1994 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1995 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1996 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1997
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001998- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1999 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2000
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002001- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002002 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002004New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002006
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002007- OpenVMS is now supported.
2008
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002009- AtheOS is now supported.
2010
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002011- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2012
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002013- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2014
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002015Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016-----
2017
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002018- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2019 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2020 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002021
2022Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002024
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002025- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2026 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2027 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2028 bugs.
2029 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002030 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002031 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2032 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002033 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002034
2035- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002036 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002037
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002038- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2039 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2040
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002041- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2042 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002043 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002044 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2045
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002046- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2047 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2048 use files" uninstall option).
2049
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002050- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2051
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002052- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2053 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2054
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002055- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2056 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2057 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2058
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002059- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2060 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2061 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2062 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2063 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002064 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2065 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2066 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002067
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002068- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002069 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002070 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2071 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2072 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2073 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2074 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2075 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2076 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2077 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2078 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2079 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2080 work around.
2081
2082- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2083 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2084 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2085 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2086 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2087 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2088 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2089 specified with O_CREAT too).
2090
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002091Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002092----
2093
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002094- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002095
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002096- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2097 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2098 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2099
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002100- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2101 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2102 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2103
2104- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2105 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2106 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2107 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2108 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2109 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2110 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2111 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002112
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002113- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2114 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2115 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002116
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002117- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2118 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2119 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2120 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2121 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002122
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002123- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2124 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2125 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002127- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2128 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002130- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2131 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2132 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2133 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2134 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002135
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002136- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2137 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2138 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2139
2140- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2141 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2142 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002143
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002144- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2145 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2146 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2147 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002148 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002150- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2151 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002152
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002153- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2154 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002155
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002156- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002157 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002158 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2159 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002160
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002161
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002162What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002163===============================
2164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002165*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2166
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002167Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002168--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002169
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002170- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2171 with a custom metaclass.
2172
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002173Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002174-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002175
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002176- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2177 are proxies.
2178
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002179Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002181
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002182- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2183 very short strings.
2184
2185- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2186 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2187 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2188 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2189 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2190
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002191Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002192-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002193
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002194- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2195 close or delete time).
2196
2197- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2198 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2199
2200- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2201
2202- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002203 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002204
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002205Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002206-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002207
2208Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002209-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002210
2211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002213
2214New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002216
2217Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002218-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002219
2220Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002221-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002222
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002223- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2224
2225- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2226 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2227
2228- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2229 deleted at process exit time.
2230
2231- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2232 in backslash.
2233
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002234Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002235----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002236
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002237- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2238 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2239 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002241
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002242What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002243===========================
2244
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002245*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2246
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002247Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002248--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002249
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002250- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2251 been extensively updated. See
2252
2253 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2254
2255 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2256
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002257- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2258 deleted!
2259
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002260- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2261 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2262 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2263 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2264 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2265
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002266- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2267
2268 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2269 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2270
2271 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2272 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2273 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2274 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2275 supported anyway.
2276
2277 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2278 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2279
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002280- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2281 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2282 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2283 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2284 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002285
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002286- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2287 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2288 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2289
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002290Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002292
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002293- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2294 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2295 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2296 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2297 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2298 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002299 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2300 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2301 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2302 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002303
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002304- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2305 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2306 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2307
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002308Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002309-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002310
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002311- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2312
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002313Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002315
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002316- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2317 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2318 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2319 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2320 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2321 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2322
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002323- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2324
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002325- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2326
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002327- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2328
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002329- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2330 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2331 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2332
2333- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2334
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002335Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002336-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002337
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002338- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2339 off a search on Google.
2340
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002341Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002342-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002343
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002344- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2345 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2346 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2347 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2348 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2349 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2350 other platforms should do likewise.
2351
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002352- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2353 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2354 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2355
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002358
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002359- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2360 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2361 producing key-value pairs.
2362
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002363- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002364 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002365 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2366 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2367 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2368 previously went unchallenged.
2369
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002370New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002371-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002372
2373Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002374-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002375
2376Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002377-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002378
2379Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002381
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002382- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2383 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002384
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002385- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2386 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2387 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2388 home.
2389
2390
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002391What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002392===========================
2393
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002394*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2395
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002396Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002397--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002398
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002399- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2400 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002401
2402 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002403 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002404
2405 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2406 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002407 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002408 This needs to be documented.
2409
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002410- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2411 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2412
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002413- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2414 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2415 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2416
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002417- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2418 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2419
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002420- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2421 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2422 class forbids it).
2423
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002424- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2425 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2426 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2427
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002428- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2429
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002430Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002431-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002432
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002433- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2434 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002435 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002436
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002437- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2438 (like 1 + '').
2439
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002440Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002441-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002442
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002443- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2444 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2445 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2446 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002447 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002448 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2449
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002450- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2451 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2452 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2453 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2454
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002455- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2456 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002457 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2458 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2459 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002460
2461- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2462 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002463
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002464- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2465 bytes on its input.
2466
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002467Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002468-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002469
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002470- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002471 convenience function.
2472
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002473- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2474 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2475 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002476 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2477 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2478 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2479 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2480 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2481 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002482
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002483- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2484 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2485 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2486 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2487
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002488- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2489 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2490 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2491
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002492- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2493 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2494 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2495 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2496
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002497- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2498 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002499 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002500 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2501 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2502 new -l and -e options.
2503
2504- statcache is now deprecated.
2505
2506- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2507 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002508 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002509 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2510 time properly taken into account.
2511
2512- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2513 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2514 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2515 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2516
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002517Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002518-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002519
2520Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002521-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002522
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002523- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2524 is built with libdb3 if available.
2525
2526- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2527
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002530
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002531- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2532 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2533 PySequence_Size().
2534
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002535- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2536
2537- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2538 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2539 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2540
2541- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2542 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2543
2544- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2545 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2546
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002549
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002550- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2551 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2552
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002553- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2554 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2555
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002556- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002559-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002560
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002561- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2562 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2563
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002564Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002565-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002566
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002567Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002569
2570- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2571 removed completely in the next release.
2572
2573- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2574 OSX.
2575
2576- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2577 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2578
2579- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002581
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002582What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002583===========================
2584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2586
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002587Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002588--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002589
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002590- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002591 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002592 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002593 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2594 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002595 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2596 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002597 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2598 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002599
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002600- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2601 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2602
2603- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2604 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2605
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002606Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002607-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002608
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002609- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2610 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2611 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2612 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2613 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2614 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2615 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2616 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2617
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002618- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2619 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2620 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2621 example).
2622
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002623- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002624 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002625 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002626 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002627
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002628- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2629 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2630 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002631 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002632
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002633- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2634 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2635 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2636 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2637 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2638 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2639
2640 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2641
2642 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2643
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002644Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002646
2647- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2648
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002649- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2650
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002651- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2652 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002653
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002654- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2655 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2656 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2657 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2658 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2659 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002660 attributes.
2661
2662- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2663 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2664 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002665
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002666- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2667 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2668 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002669
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002670- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2671 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2672 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002673 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2674 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2675
2676- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2677 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002678
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002681
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002682- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2683 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2684
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002685- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2686 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2687 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2688 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2689
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002690- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2691 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2692 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2693 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2694
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002695 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2696 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2697 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2698 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2699 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2700 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2701 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2702 without losing information).
2703
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002704- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002705 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2706 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2707 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2708 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2709 module).
2710
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002711 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002712 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2713 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2714 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2715 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002716
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002717- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002718 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2719 encoding.
2720
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002721- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2722 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2723
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002725 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2726
2727- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2728 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2729 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2730 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2731
2732- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2733
2734- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2735 ON, and OFF.
2736
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002737- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2738 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2739
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002740Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002742
2743- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2744 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2745 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002746
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002747- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2748 been added: -X and -E.
2749
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002750Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002752
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002753- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2754 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2755
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002758
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002759- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2760 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2761 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2762 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2763 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2764
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002765- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2766 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2767 as long) arguments.
2768
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002769- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2770 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2771 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2772 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2773 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2774 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2775
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002776- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2777 input.
2778
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002779New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002780-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002781
2782Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002784
2785Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002787
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002788- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2789 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2790 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2791
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002792- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2793 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2794 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002795 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2798 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2799 import signal
2800 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002801
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002803 while 1:
2804 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002805 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002806 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2807 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2808 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2809 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002810
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002811
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002812What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2813===========================
2814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002815*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2816
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002818--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002819
2820- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2821 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2822 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2823
2824- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2825 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2826 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2827 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2828 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2829 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2830 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002831
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002832- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002833 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002834 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2835 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2836 associate a docstring with a property.
2837
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002838- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2839 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2840 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2841 other built-in object types.
2842
2843- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2844 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2845 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2846 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2847 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2848
2849- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2850 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2851
2852- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2853 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002854 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002855 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2856 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2857 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2858 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2859 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2860
2861- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2862 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2863 class.
2864
2865- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2866 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2867 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2868 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2869
2870- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2871 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2872 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2873 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2874
2875- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2876 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2877
2878- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2879 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2880 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2881 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2882 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002883 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002884 with the same value as s.
2885
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002886- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2887
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002888Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002890
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002891- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2892
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002893- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2894 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2895 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2896 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2897 objects.
2898
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002899- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2900 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002901 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2902 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2903
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002904- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2905 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2906 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2907
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002908Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002910
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002911- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2912 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2913 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2914 by the instances.
2915
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002916- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2917 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2918 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2919
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002920- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2921 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2922 before the entire comparison is complete.
2923
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002924- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2925 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2926 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2927
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002928- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2929 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2930 getwriter().
2931
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002932- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2933 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2934
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002935- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002936 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2937 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2938
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002939- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2940 iterable object.
2941
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002942- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2943 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002944
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002945- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2946 authentication.
2947
2948- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2949 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002950
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002951- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002952 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2953 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2954 a sample driver.)
2955
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002956Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002958
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002959- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2960 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2961 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2962 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2963 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2964 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2965 kernel has large file support.
2966
2967- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2968 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2969 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2970 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2971 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2972
2973- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2974 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2975 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2976
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002977C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002979
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002980- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2981 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2982
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002985
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002986- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2987 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2988
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002989Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002991
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002992- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2993 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2994 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2995 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2996 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2997
2998- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2999 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3000 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3001 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3002
3003- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3004 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3005
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003006Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003008
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003009- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003010 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3011 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003012
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003013
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003014What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3015===========================
3016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3018
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003019Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003021
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003022- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3023 big to represent as a C double.
3024
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003025- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3026 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3027 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3028 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3029 restriction).
3030
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003031- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3032 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3033 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3034 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3035 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3036
3037 >>> dir([])
3038 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3039 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3040 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3041 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3042 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3043 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3044 'reverse', 'sort']
3045
3046 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3047
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003048- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003049 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3050 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3051 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3052 OverflowError exception.
3053
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003054- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003055 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003056 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3057 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3058 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3059 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3060 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003061 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3063 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3064
3065 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3066 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3067 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3068 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003069
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003070- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003071 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3072 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3073 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3074 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3075 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3076 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3077 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3078 once it is created.
3079
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003080- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3081 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3082 (key, value) pairs.
3083
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003084- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003085 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3086 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3087
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003088- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3089 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3090 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3091 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3092 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003093
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003094- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003095 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3096 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3097
3098 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3099
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003100- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003101 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3102
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003105
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003106- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003107 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3108 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003109
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003110- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3111 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3112 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3113 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3114 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3115 in this area anymore).
3116
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003117- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3118 threading.Timer.
3119
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003120- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3121 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3122
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003123- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003124 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3125
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003126- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003127 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3128 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3129 converted to Python longs.
3130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003131- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003132 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3133
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003134- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3135 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3136 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3137
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003138Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003139-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003140
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003141- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3142 division operators as per PEP 238.
3143
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003144Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003146
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003147- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3148 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3149 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3150 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3151
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003152C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003154
3155- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003156
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003157- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3158 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003159 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3162 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003163 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003165
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003166- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003167 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3168 module:
3169
3170 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003171
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003172 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3173 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003174
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003175 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3176 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003177
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003178 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3179
3180 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3181
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003182- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003183 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3184 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3185 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003186
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003187New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003189
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003190- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3191 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3192 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3193 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3194 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003195
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003196Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003198
3199Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003201
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003202- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3203 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3204 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3205 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003206 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3207 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3208 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3209 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3210 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003211
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003212- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003213 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3214
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003215
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003216What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3217===========================
3218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3220
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003221Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003223
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003224- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3225 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3226
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003227- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3228 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3229 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003230
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003231- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3232 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3233 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3234 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003235
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003236- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003239
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003240Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003242
3243- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003244 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003245 the module docstring for details.
3246
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003247Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003249
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003250- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003251 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3252 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3253 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003254
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003255- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3256 Nick Mathewson.
3257
3258Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003260
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003261- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3262 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3263 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3264 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3265 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3266 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3267 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3268 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3269
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003270- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3271 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3272 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3273 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3274
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003275- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3276 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3277 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3278 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3279 come a long way).
3280
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003281- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3282 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3283 write filters for these warnings).
3284
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003285- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3286 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3287 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3288 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3289 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3290
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003291- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3292 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3293 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3294 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3295 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3296 older distribution.
3297
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003298Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003300
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003301- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3302 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003303 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003304
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003305- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3306 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3307 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3308
3309- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3310
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003311- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3312
3313- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3314
3315- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003318
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003319- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3320
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003321New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003323
3324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003326
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003327- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3328 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3329 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3330 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3331 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3332 against buffer overruns.
3333
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003334- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003335 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3336 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003337 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3338 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3339 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3340
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003341- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3342 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3343 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3344 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3345 deprecated.
3346
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003349
3350- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3351 relevant is found.
3352
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003353
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003354What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003355===========================
3356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3358
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003359Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003361
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003362- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3363 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3364 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3365 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3366 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3367 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3368 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3369 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003370 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003371 repaired.
3372
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003373- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003374 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003375 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3376 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3377 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3378 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3379 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3380 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3381 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3382 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3383
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003384- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3385 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3386 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3387 leading BMO character).
3388
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003389- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3390 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3391 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3392
3393 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3394 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3395 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003396
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003397 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3398 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3399 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3400 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3401 for various simple to use conversions.
3402
3403 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3404 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3405
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3407 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3408 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3409 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3410 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3411 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3412 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3413 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3415 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3416 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3417 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3418 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3419 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3420 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003421
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003422- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3423 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3424 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003425 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003426 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003427
3428 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003429 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3430 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3431 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3432 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3433 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003434 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3435 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003436
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003437 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3438 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3439 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003440 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003441
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003442- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3443 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3444 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3445 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3446 floating arithmetic,
3447
3448 x = 9007199254740992.0
3449 print long(x)
3450
3451 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3452 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3453 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3454 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3455 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3456 functions are of good quality).
3457
3458 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3459 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3460 algorithms to break.
3461
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003462- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3463 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3464 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3465 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3466 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3467 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3468 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3469 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3470 order.
3471
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003472- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3473 operation along the most common code paths.
3474
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003475- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3476 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3477
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003478- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3479 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3480 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3481 {}.update(UserDict())
3482
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003483- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3484 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3485 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3486 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3487 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3488 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3489 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3490 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3491
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003492- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003493 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003495 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003496 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3497 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003498 join() method of strings
3499 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003500 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3501 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003503 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003504
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003505- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3506 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3507
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003508- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3509 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3510
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003511- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3512 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3513 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3514 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3515
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003516- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3517 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003518 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003519 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3520 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003521
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003522- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3523
3524
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003525Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003527
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003528- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003529 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003530 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3531 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3532
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003533- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3534 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3535
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003536- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3537 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3538 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3539 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3540
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003541- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3542 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3543 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3544
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003545- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3546
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003547- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3548
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003549- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3550 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3551 that are still imported into string.py).
3552
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003553- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3554
3555- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3556 Now it does.
3557
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003558- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3559
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003560- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3561 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3562 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3563 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3564 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003565 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3566 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003567
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003568- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3569 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3570 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3571 'help(object)'.
3572
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003573Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003575
3576- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003577 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003578 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3579 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3580
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003581- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003582 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3583 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003584
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003585C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003587
3588- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3589 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590
3591----
3592
3593**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**