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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000050- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
51 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
52 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
53 supposed to have been truncated away.
54
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000055- Added socket.socketpair().
56
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000057Library
58-------
59
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000060- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot.
61
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000062- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
63 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
64
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000065- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
66
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000067- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
68
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000069- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
70
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000071- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
72 Percivall.
73
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000074- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
75 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
76
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000077- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
78 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
79 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000080 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000081
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000082- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
83 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
84 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
85 and exponent.
86
87- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
88
89- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
90 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
91 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
92
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000093- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
94 to the readline module.
95
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000096- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000097 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
98 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000099
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000100- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
101 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
102 contains symlinks.
103
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000104- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
105 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
106
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000107- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
108 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
109 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
110
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000111- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
112 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
113 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
114 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
115 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
116 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
117 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
118 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
119 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
120 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
121 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
122 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
123 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
124
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000125- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
126
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000127Tools/Demos
128-----------
129
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000130- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
131 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
132
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000133- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
134
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000135Build
136-----
137
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000138- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
139 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
140
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000141- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
142 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
143
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000144- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
145 GNU/k*BSD systems.
146
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000147- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
148 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
149
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000150C API
151-----
152
153Documentation
154-------------
155
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000156- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
157 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
158
159- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
160 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
161 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000162
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000163New platforms
164-------------
165
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000166- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
167
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000168Tests
169-----
170
171Windows
172-------
173
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000174- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
175 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
176 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
177 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
178 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
179 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
180 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
181 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
182 the problem.
183
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000184Mac
185---
186
187
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000188What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
189=================================
190
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000191*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000192
193Core and builtins
194-----------------
195
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000196- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
197 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
198 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
199 sensitive code.
200
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000201- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
202 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
203 @staticmethod
204 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000205 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000206
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000207- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
208 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
209 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
210 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
211 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
212 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
213 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
214 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
215 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
216 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
217 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
218
219 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
220 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
221 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
222 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
223 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
224 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
225 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
226
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000227- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
228 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
229
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000230- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000231 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000232
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000233- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000234 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000235 which was missing for no apparent reason.
236
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000237- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000238 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
239 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
240
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000241- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
242 types that support garbage collection.
243
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000244- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
245
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000246- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
247 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
248 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
249 Jython.
250
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000251- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
252
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000253- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
254 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
255
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000256- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
257 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
258 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000259
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000260- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
261 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
262 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
263
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000264Extension modules
265-----------------
266
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000267- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
268
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000269Library
270-------
271
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000272- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
273 TIS-620
274
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000275- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
276 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
277 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
278 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
279 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
280 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
281 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
282 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
283 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
284 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
285
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000286- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
287
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000288- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
289 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
290 same as when the argument is omitted).
291 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
292
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000293- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
294
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000295- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
296 schemes are offered.
297
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000298- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
299
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000300- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
301 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
302 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
303
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000304- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
305
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000306- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
307 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
308
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000309- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
310 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
311 when dummy_threading is being used.
312
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000313- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
314 from a tarfile.
315
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000316- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000317 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000318
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000319- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
320 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
321 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
322 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
323
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000324- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
325 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
326
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000327- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
328 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
329 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
330 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
331 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
332 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
333 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
334 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
335 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
336 by some other method in progress).
337
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000338- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
339 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
340 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000341
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000342- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
343
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000344- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
345 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
346 AM Kuchling.
347
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000348- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
349 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
350 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
351
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000352- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
353 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
354 instead of unsigned.
355
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000356- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000357 no longer part of the public API.
358
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000359- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
360 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
361 string methods of the same name).
362
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000363- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000364 SF patch 945642.
365
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000366- doctest unittest integration improvements:
367
368 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
369
370 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
371 DocTestSuites.
372
373- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
374 that provide thread-local data.
375
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000376- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
377 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
378
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000379- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
380
381- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
382 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
383 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
384
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000385- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
386
387 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
388 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
389 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000390
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000391 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
392 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
393 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
394 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
395
396 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
397 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
398
399 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
400 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
401 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
402 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
403
404 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
405 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
406 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
407 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
408 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
409
410 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
411 wrapping help output.
412
413 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
414 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
415 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000416
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000417C API
418-----
419
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000420- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
421 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
422 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
423 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
424 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
425 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
426 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
427 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
428 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
429 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
430 its visible semantics have not changed.
431
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000432- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
433 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
434
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000435Documentation
436-------------
437
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000438- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000439
440 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000441 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000442
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000443 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000444
445 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
446
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000447- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000448
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000449Tests
450-----
451
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000452- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000453 platforms that use the Makefile.
454
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000455- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
456 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
457 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
458
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000459
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000460What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
461=================================
462
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000463*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000464
465Core and builtins
466-----------------
467
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000468- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
469 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
470 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
471 objects now (one object instead of three).
472
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000473- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
474 Windows DLLs.
475
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000476- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
477 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000478
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000479- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
480 a new .pyc magic.
481
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000482- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
483 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
484 be there.
485
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000486- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
487 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
488 the LC_NUMERIC category.
489
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000490- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
491 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
492 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
493
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000494- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
495
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000496- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
497 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
498 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000499
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000500- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
501 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
502
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000503- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
504
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000505- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000506 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000507
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000508- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
509
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000510- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
511
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000512- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
513 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
514
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000515- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
516 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
517 Fixes bug #858016 .
518
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000519- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
520 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
521 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
522
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000523- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
524 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
525 improves their performance (about 35%).
526
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000527- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
528 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
529 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
530
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000531- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
532 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
533 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
534 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
535
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000536- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
537 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
538 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
539 length is not known).
540
541- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
542 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000543 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
544 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000545 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
546
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000547- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
548 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
549
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000550- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
551 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
552 keyword arguments.
553
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000554- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
555 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
556 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
557
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000558- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
559 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
560 cases.
561
562- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
563 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
564 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
565 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
566 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
567 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
568 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
569 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
570 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
571 a release build.
572
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000573- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
574 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
575
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000576- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000577 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000578
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000579- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
580 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
581 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
582 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
583 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
584 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
585 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
586 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
587 destroyed.
588
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000589- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
590 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
591 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
592 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
593 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
594 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
595 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
596 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
597
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000598- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
599 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
600 character other than a space.
601
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000602- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
603 by the function object or by the method object, the function
604 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
605 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
606 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
607 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
608 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
609 attributes with the same name.
610
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000611- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
612 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
613 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
614 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
615 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
616 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
617 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
618 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
619 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
620 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
621 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
622 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
623 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
624 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000625
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000626- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
627 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
628 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
629 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
630 This has been repaired.
631
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000632- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
633
634- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
635
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000636- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
637 over a sequence.
638
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000639- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000640 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000641
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000642- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
643
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000644- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
645 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
646 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
647 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
648 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
649 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
650 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
651 records with equal keys is unchanged).
652
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000653- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
654 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
655 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
656
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000657- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
658 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
659 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
660 freelist.
661
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000662- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
663 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
664
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000665- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
666 number.
667
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000668- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
669 a TypeError exception.
670
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000671- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
672 820195.
673
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000674- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
675 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
676 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
677
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000678- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000679 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
680 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000681
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000682- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
683 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
684 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
685
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000686- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
687 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000688 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000689
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000690- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000691 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
692 the first call.
693
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000695Extension modules
696-----------------
697
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000698- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
699 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
700
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000701- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
702 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
703 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
704 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
705 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
706 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
707 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000708
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000709- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
710
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000711- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
712
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000713- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
714 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
715
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000716- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
717 fewer false positives.
718
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000719- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
720 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
721
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000722- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000723 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
724
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000725- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000726 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000727 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
728 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
729 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000730
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000731- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
732 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
733 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
734 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
735
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000736- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
737 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
738 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
739 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
740 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
741 #897625.
742
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000743- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
744 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
745
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000746- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
747 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
748 and pops on either side of the deque.
749
750- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
751 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
752
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000753- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
754 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
755 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
756 other functions that expect a function argument.
757
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000758- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
759
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000760- os.getsid was added.
761
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000762- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
763 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
764 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
765
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000766- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
767
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000768- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
769
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000770- readline.clear_history was added.
771
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000772- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
773
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000774- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
775
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000776- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
777
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000778- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
779
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000780- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
781
782- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
783
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000784- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
785
786- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
787
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000788- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
789 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
790 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
791
792- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
793 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
794 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
795 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
796 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
797 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
798 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
799
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000800- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
801 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
802 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
803 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000804
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000805- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000806 iterators from a single iterable.
807
808- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
809 of raising a TypeError exception.
810
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000811- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
812 as parameter.
813
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000814Library
815-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000816
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000817- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
818 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
819 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000820
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000821- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
822 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
823 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000824
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000825- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000826
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000827- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
828 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000829
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000830- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
831 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
832
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000833- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
834
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000835- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000836 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000837
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000838- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
839 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
840
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000841- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
842
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000843- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
844 on cygwin and mingw32.
845
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000846- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
847
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000848- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
849 module.
850
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000851- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
852 installation scheme for all platforms.
853
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000854- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000855 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000856
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000857- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
858 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
859 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
860
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000861- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
862 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
863 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
864
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000865- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
866
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000867- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
868
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000869- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
870 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
871
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000872- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
873 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
874 type pattern with the same value exists.
875
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000876- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
877 when run from the command prompt).
878
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000879- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
880 not taken into consideration when caching value.
881
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000882- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
883 default sort).
884
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000885- Added global runctx function to profile module
886
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000887- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
888
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000889- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
890
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000891- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
892
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000893- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000894 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
895 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
896 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
897 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
898 accordingly.
899
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000900- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
901 decoding standards.
902
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000903- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
904 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
905 called for all requests.
906
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000907- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
908 they are passed to the compiler.
909
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000910- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
911 indent, width and depth.
912
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000913- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
914 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
915
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000916- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
917 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
918
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000919- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
920
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000921- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
922
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000923- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
924
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000925- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
926 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
927
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000928- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000929 for better performance.
930
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000931- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000932
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000933- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
934 a string).
935
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000936- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
937
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000938- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
939
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000940- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
941
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000942- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
943
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000944- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
945 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
946 list of fieldnames.
947
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000948- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
949 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
950
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000951- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
952
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000953- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
954 empty lists.
955
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000956- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
957 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
958 and shelves.
959
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000960- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
961 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
962
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000963- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000964 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
965 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000966
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000967- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
968 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000969 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000970
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000971- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000972 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
973 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
974
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000975- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
976 and removed in Py2.4.
977
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000978- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
979
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000980- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
981
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000982Tools/Demos
983-----------
984
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000985- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
986 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
987
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000988- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
989
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000990- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
991 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
992 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
993 destination in situations where both files are given.
994
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000995- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
996 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
997 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
998 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
999
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001000- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1001
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001002- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1003 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1004 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1005 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1006 now.
1007
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001008- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1009 in effect
1010
1011- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1012 C-c C-h
1013
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001014- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1015 -d option was given.
1016
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001017Build
1018-----
1019
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001020- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1021 build under OS X.
1022
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001023- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1024 --enable-profiling.
1025
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001026- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1027 is configured --with-tsc.
1028
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001029- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1030 on AMD64.
1031
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001032- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1033 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1034
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001035- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1036 removed.
1037
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001038- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1039 supported (see PEP 11).
1040
1041- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1042
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001043- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1044
1045- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1046 (see PEP 11).
1047
1048- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1049 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1050
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001051C API
1052-----
1053
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001054- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1055 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1056 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1057
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001058- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1059 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1060 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1061 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1062
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001063- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1064 generator objects.
1065
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001066- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1067 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001068 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1069 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001070
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001071- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1072 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1073
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001074- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1075 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1076 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1077 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1078 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1079
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001080- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1081 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1082 about 10% faster.
1083
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001084- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1085 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1086
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001087- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1088 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1089 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1090 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1091
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001092Windows
1093-------
1094
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001095- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1096 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1097 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1098 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1099
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001100- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1101 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1102 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1103
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001104
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001105What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1106===============================
1107
1108*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1109
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001110IDLE
1111----
1112
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001113- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1114 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1115 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1116 context-menu actions.
1117
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001118- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1119 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1120 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1121 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1122 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1123 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1124 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1125 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1126 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1127
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001128
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001129What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1130=============================================
1131
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001132*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001133
1134Core and builtins
1135-----------------
1136
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001137- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001138 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001139 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1140
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001141Extension modules
1142-----------------
1143
1144- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1145 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1146 than once. This has been fixed.
1147
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001148- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1149 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1150 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1151 call.
1152
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001153- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1154
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001155Library
1156-------
1157
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001158- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1159 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1160
1161- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1162 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1163 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1164 restored.
1165
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001166IDLE
1167----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001168
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001169- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001170
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001171Build
1172-----
1173
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001174- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1175 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1176
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001177C API
1178-----
1179
1180Windows
1181-------
1182
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001183- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1184 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1185
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001186- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1187
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001188Mac
1189---
1190
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001191- Various fixes to pimp.
1192
1193- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1194
1195- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1196 more problems than it solves.
1197
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001198
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001199What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1200=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001201
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001202*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1203
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001204Core and builtins
1205-----------------
1206
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001207- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1208 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1209
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001210- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1211 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001212 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001213
1214- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1215 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1216 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001217 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001218
1219- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1220 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001221
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001222- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1223 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1224 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1225
1226- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001227 770247.
1228
1229- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001230
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001231Extension modules
1232-----------------
1233
1234- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1235 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1236
1237- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1238
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001239- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1240
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001241- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1242 contained within the _strptime module.
1243
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001244- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1245 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1246
1247- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001248 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1249
1250- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1251 the find_class attribute, if present.
1252
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001253- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001254
1255 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1256 (SF bug 763298).
1257
1258 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001259 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1260 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1261 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001262
1263 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1264
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001265Library
1266-------
1267
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001268- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1269
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001270- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1271 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1272 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1273 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1274 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1275 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1276 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1277 or Tester().
1278
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001279- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1280 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1281 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1282 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1283 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1284 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1285 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1286 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1287 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001288
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001289 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001290
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001291- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1292 weren't before was an oversight.
1293
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001294- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1295 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1296
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001297- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1298 when there are no lines.
1299
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001300- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1301 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1302
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001303- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1304 to child processes.
1305
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001306- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1307
1308- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1309
1310- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1311 xmlrpclib.
1312
1313- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1314 responses.
1315
1316- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1317 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1318
1319- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1320 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1321 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1322
1323- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1324 used as patterns.
1325
1326- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1327 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1328 than Tk 8.3.
1329
1330- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1331
1332- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001333
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001334Tools/Demos
1335-----------
1336
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001337- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1338
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001339- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1340
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001341- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001342
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001343Build
1344-----
1345
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001346- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1347
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001348- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001350- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1351 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001352
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001353- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1354 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1355 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001356
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001357C API
1358-----
1359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001360- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1361 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1362
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001363Windows
1364-------
1365
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001366- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1367 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1368 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1369 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1370 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1371 Python exception ::
1372
1373 thread.error: can't start new thread
1374
1375 is raised now.
1376
1377- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1378 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1379 instead of from DLL teardown.
1380
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001381Mac
1382---
1383
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001384- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001385 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001386 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1387 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1388 the executable in the bundle.
1389
1390- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001391
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001392- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1393
1394- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1395 on Panther.
1396
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001397What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1398================================
1399
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001400*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001401
1402Core and builtins
1403-----------------
1404
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001405- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1406 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1407 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1408 with the -i option.
1409
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001410- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1411 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1412
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001413- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1414 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1415
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001416- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1417 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1418 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1419 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1420 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1421 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1422 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1423 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1424 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1425 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1426 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1427 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1428 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001429
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001430- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1431 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1432 embedded in a lambda expression.
1433
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001434- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1435 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1436 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1437 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1438 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1439
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001440- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1441 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1442 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1443
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001444- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1445 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1446
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001447- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1448 It's writable again.
1449
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001450- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1451 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1452 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001453 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001454
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001455- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1456 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1457 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1458
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001459Extension modules
1460-----------------
1461
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001462- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1463 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1464
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001465- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1466 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1467 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1468 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1469
1470- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1471 collection.
1472
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001473- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1474 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1475 unique within a single program run.
1476
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001477- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1478 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1479
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001480- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1481 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1482
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001483- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1484 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001485
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001486- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1487
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001488- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1489 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1490
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001491- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1492 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1493 for many BSD-derived systems.
1494
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001495
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001496Library
1497-------
1498
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001499- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1500 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1501 primary ones:
1502
1503 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1504 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1505 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1506
1507 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1508 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1509 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1510 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1511 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1512 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1513
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001514- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1515 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1516 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1517 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1518 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1519 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1520 argument.
1521
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001522- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1523 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1524 in the archive.
1525
1526- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1527 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1528
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001529- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1530 569574).
1531
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001532- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1533 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1534 no more.
1535
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001536- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1537 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1538 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1539 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1540 code coverage.
1541
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001542- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1543 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1544 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001545 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1546 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001547
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001548- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1549 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1550 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001551 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001552
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001553- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1554
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001555- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1556 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1557 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1558 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1559
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001560- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1561 handling.
1562
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001563- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1564 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1565
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001566- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1567 in socket.py.
1568
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001569- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1570
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001571- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1572 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1573 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1574 opener with proxy support.
1575
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001576- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1577
1578- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1579
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001580Tools/Demos
1581-----------
1582
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001583- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1584
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001585- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1586
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001587- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1588 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001589
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001590- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1591 files.
1592
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001593Build
1594-----
1595
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001596- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001597 different root directory.
1598
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001599C API
1600-----
1601
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001602- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1603 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1604 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1605 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1606 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1607 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1608 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1609 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1610 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1611 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1612
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001613- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1614 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1615 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1616 from Python.
1617
1618
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001619New platforms
1620-------------
1621
1622None this time.
1623
1624Tests
1625-----
1626
1627- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1628 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1629
1630Windows
1631-------
1632
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001633- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1634
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001635- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1636 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1637 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1638 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1639 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1640 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1641 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1642 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1643 that's what it's for.
1644
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001645Mac
1646---
1647
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001648- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1649 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1650 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1651 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001652- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1653 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1654- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001655
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001656SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1657------------------------------------
1658
1659430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1660598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1661622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1662661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1663683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1664697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1665713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1666724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1667727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1668729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1669730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1670731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1671732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1672733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1673735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1674740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1675744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1676745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1677747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1678749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1679751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1680753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1681755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1682757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1683760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1684
1685
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001686What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1687================================
1688
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001689*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001690
1691Core and builtins
1692-----------------
1693
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001694- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1695 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1696
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001697- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1698 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1699 and cannot be strings).
1700
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001701- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1702 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1703 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1704 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1705
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001706- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1707 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1708 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1709 Python itself.
1710
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001711- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1712 the referenced object, if it has one.
1713
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001714- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1715 the thread started at
1716 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1717
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001718- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1719 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1720 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1721 placed on a list index.
1722
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001723- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1724 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1725 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1726 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1727
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001728- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1729 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1730 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1731 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1732 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1733 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1734 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1735
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001736- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1737 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1738 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1739 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1740 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1741
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001742- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1743 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001744
1745- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1746 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1747 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1748 #693195.)
1749
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001750- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1751 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001752
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001753- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001754 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001755 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1756 interpreter executions, would fail.
1757
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001758- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001759 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001760 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001761
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001762Extension modules
1763-----------------
1764
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001765- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1766 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1767 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1768 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1769
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001770- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1771 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1772
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001773- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1774 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1775 and Greg Chapman.)
1776
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001777- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1778 recursively.
1779
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001780- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001781 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1782 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1783 leaks.
1784
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001785- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1786
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001787- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1788 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1789 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1790 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1791 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1792 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1793 #705836.
1794
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001795- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001796 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1797
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001798- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1799 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1800 See SF bug #692416.
1801
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001802- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1803 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1804
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001805- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1806 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1807 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001808
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001809- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001810 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1811 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1812
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001813- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1814 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1815 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1816 timeouts to work properly.
1817
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001818Library
1819-------
1820
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001821- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1822 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1823 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1824 future release.
1825
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001826- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1827 for querying platform dependent features.
1828
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001829- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001830
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001831- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1832 pickle protocol versions.
1833
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001834- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1835 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1836 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1837
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001838- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1839
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001840- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1841 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1842 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1843 modules.
1844
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001845- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1846 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1847 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1848
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001849- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1850 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1851
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001852- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1853 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1854 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1855
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001856- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001857 MS Office extensions.
1858
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001859- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1860 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1861
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001862- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1863 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1864
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001865- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1866 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1867 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1868 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1869 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1870 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1871
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001872- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1873 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1874 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001875
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001876- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1877 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1878 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1879
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001880- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1881
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001882- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1883 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1884 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1885
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001886Tools/Demos
1887-----------
1888
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001889- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1890 See the module docstring for details.
1891
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001892Build
1893-----
1894
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001895- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1896 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001897
1898C API
1899-----
1900
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001901- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1902
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001903- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1904 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1905 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1906
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001907- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1908 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001909
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001910 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1911 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1912 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001913
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001914- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001915 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1916
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001917- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1918 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1919 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001920
1921New platforms
1922-------------
1923
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001924None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001925
1926Tests
1927-----
1928
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001929- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1930 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001931
1932Windows
1933-------
1934
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001935- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1936 function.
1937
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001938- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1939 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001940
1941Mac
1942---
1943
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001944- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1945 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001946
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001947- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1948 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001949
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001950- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1951 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1952 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001953
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001954- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001955 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1956 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001957
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001958- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1959 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001960
1961
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001962What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1963=================================
1964
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001965*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001966
1967Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001968-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001969
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001970- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1971 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1972 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1973
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001974- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1975 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1976 (SF patch #664376.)
1977
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001978- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1979 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1980 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1981 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1982 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1983 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001984 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001985
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001986- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1987 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1988 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1989 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001990 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001991
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001992- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1993 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1994 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1995 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1996 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1997 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1998 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1999 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2000 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2001 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2002 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2003
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002004- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2005 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2006 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2007 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2008 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2009 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2010
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002011- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2012 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2013
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002014- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2015 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2016 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2017 case.)
2018
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002019- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2020 passed as unicode strings.
2021
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002022- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2023 See SF bug #683467.
2024
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002025- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2026 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2027
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002028- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2029
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002030- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2031
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002032- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2033 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2034 arguments.
2035
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002036- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2037 See SF bug #667147.
2038
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002039- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002040 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002041 See SF bug #676155.
2042
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002043- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002044 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002045 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2046 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2047 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2048 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2049 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2050 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002051
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002052Extension modules
2053-----------------
2054
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002055- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2056 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2057 tp_as_number pointer.
2058
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002059- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2060 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2061 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2062 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2063 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2064
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002065- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2066
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002067- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2068
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002069- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002070 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002071 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2072 patch #678531.)
2073
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002074- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2075 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2076
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002077- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2078 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2079
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002080- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2081
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002082- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2083 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2084 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2085
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002086- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2087
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002088- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2089 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2090
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002091- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002092
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002093- datetime changes:
2094
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002095 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2096
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002097 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2098 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2099 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2100 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2101 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2102 now.
2103
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002104 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002105 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2106 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002107
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002108 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002109 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002110 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2111 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2112 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2113 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002114
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002115 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2116 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2117 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002118 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2119
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002120 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2121 by a later example coded by Guido.
2122
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002123 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002124 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2125 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2126 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002127 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2128 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2129
2130 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2131 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2132 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2133 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2134 tzinfo subclass instance.
2135
2136 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2137 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2138 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2139 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2140 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2141 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2142 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2143 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002144
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002145 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2146 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2147 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2148 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2149 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002150 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2151
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002152 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002153
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002154 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2155 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2156 as a naive datetime object.
2157
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002158 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2159 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2160 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2161
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002162 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2163 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2164 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2165 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2166 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2167 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2168 comparison.
2169
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002170 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2171 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2172 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2173 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002174 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002175
2176 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002177
2178 and ::
2179
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002180 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2181
2182 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2183 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2184 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2185 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2186
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002187 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2188 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2189 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2190 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2191 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2192
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002193 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2194 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002195 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2196 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002197
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002198Library
2199-------
2200
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002201- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2202 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2203
2204- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2205 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2206 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2207 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2208 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2209 See PEP 307 for details.
2210
2211- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2212 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2213
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002214- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2215 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002216 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002217 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2218 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002219 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002220
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002221- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2222 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2223
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002224- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2225 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2226 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2227
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002228- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2229
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002230- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2231 exception.
2232
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002233- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2234 class.
2235
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002236- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2237 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2238 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2239
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002240- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2241 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2242
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002243- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002244 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2245 See SF bug #659228.
2246
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002247- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2248 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2249 See SF patch #651082.
2250
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002251- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002252
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002253- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2254 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2255
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002256- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002257 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002258
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002259- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2260 DOS paths from other platforms.
2261
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002262Tools/Demos
2263-----------
2264
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002265- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2266 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2267 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2268 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2269 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2270 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2271 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2272 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2273 example:
2274
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002275 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2276 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002277
2278 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2279
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002281Build
2282-----
2283
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002284- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2285 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2286 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002287 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2288
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002289 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2290
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002291- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2292 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2293 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2294 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2295 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2296 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2297 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2298 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2299 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2300
2301- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2302 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2303 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2304 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2305
2306- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2307 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2308
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002309C API
2310-----
2311
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002312- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2313 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002314
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002315- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2316 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2317 tp_as_number pointer.
2318
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002319- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2320 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2321 (SF #681367)
2322
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002323- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2324 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2325 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2326 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002327
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002328Tests
2329-----
2330
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002331- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002332 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2333 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2334 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2335 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2336 pydoc.)
2337
2338- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2339
2340- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002341
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002342Windows
2343-------
2344
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002345- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2346 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2347 time).
2348
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002349- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2350 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2351
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002352- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2353 release without strong cryptography.
2354
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002355- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002356 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002357
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002358- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2359 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2360
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002361Mac
2362---
2363
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002364- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2365 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002366
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002367- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2368 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2369 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002370
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002371- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2372 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002373
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002374- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2375 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2376 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2377 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002378
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002379- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002380 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2381 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2382 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002384
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002385What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002386=================================
2387
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002388*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002389
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002390Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002392
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002393- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2394
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002395- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2396 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002397 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002398 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002399 a different meaning than before.
2400
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002401- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002402 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002403 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002404
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002405- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002406 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002407 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002408
2409- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2410 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2411 and deallocation.
2412
2413- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2414 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2415
2416- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2417 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2418 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2419 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2420 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2421
2422- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2423 now detected by the garbage collector.
2424
2425- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2426 [SF bug 519621]
2427
2428- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2429 identifier.
2430
2431- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2432 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2433 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2434 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2435 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2436 [SF bug 563060]
2437
2438- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2439 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2440 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2441 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2442 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2443
2444- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2445 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2446 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2447
2448- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2449
2450- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2451 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2452 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2453 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2454 state of the slots would be lost.)
2455
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002456Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002457-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002458
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002459- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002460 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2461 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2462 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2463 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002464 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2465 Jython 2.1.
2466
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002467- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002468 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002469 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2470 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2471 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2472 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2473 these, see PEP 302.
2474
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002475- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2476 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2477 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2478
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002479- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2480 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2481 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2482
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002483- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2484 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2485 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2486
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002487- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2488 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2489 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2490 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2491 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2492 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2493 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2494 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2495 releases or implementations.
2496
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002497- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002498 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2499 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002500
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002501- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2502 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2503
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002504- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2505 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2506 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2507
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002508- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2509 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2510
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002511- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2512 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002513 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2514 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002515
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002516- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2517 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2518 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2519 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2520 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2521
2522 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2523 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2524 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2525 pattern.
2526
2527 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2528 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2529 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2530 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2531
2532 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2533 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2534 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2535 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2536 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2537 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2538
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002539- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2540 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2541 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2542 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2543 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2544 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2545 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2546 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002547
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002548- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2549 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2550 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2551 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2552 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002553 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2554 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2555 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2556 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2557 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2558 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2559 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002560
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002561- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2562 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2563
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002564- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2565 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2566 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2567 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2568 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2569 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2570 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2571 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2572 to Zack Weinberg!
2573
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002574- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2575 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2576 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2577 type. This has been fixed now.
2578
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002579- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2580 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2581 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2582
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002583- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2584 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2585 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2586 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2587 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2588 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2589 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2590 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002591 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002592
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002593- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2594 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2595 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002596
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002597- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2598 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2599 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2600 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2601 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2602 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2603 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2604 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002605 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002606 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2607 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2608
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002609- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2610 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2611 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2612 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2613 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2614 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2615 this.)
2616
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002617- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2618 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002619 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002620 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002621 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2622 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002623 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2624 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002625
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002626- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2627 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2628 currently running.
2629
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002630- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2631 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2632 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2633 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2634
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002635- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2636 as directory names.
2637
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002638- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2639 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2640
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002641- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2642 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2643
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002644- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002645 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2646 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002647
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002648- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2649 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2650 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2651 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2652 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2653
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002654- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2655 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2656 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2657 removed.
2658
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002659- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2660 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2661 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2662
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002663- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2664 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2665 to __debug__.
2666
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002667- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2668 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2669 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2670
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002671- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2672 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2673 deprecated now.
2674
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002675- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2676 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2677 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002678
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002679- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2680 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2681 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2682 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2683 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002684
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002685- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2686 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2687
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002688- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2689 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2690 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002691 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002692 is backward compatible.
2693
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002694- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2695 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2696 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2697 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2698 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2699
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002700- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2701 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2702 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2703 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2704 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2705 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002706
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002707- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2708 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2709
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002710- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2711 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2712
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002713- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2714 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2715 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2716 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2717 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2718
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002719- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2720 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2721 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2722
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002723- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002724 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2725
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002726- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2727 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2728 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002729
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002730- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2731 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2732
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002733- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2734 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2735 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2736
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002737- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2738
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002739Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002740-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002741
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002742- Added three operators to the operator module:
2743 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2744 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2745 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2746
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002747- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2748
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002749- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2750 archives.
2751
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002752- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2753 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2754 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2755
2756 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2757
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002758- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2759 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2760 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002761 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002762
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002763- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2764 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2765 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2766 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002767 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2768 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2769 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2770 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002771
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002772- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2773 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002774
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002775- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2776
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002777- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2778 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2779
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002780- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2781 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2782 supported.
2783
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002784- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2785
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002786- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2787 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002788
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002789- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2790 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2791
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002792- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2793
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002794- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2795 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2796
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002797- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2798 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2799 functions but callable type objects.
2800
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002801- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002802 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002803 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002804
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002805- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2806 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002807
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002808- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2809 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002810
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002811- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2812 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2813 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2814 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2815
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002816- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2817 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002818
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002819- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2820 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2821 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2822 and __imul__.
2823
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002824- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002825 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2826 is called.
2827
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002828- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2829 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2830 interpreter was compiled.
2831
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002832- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2833 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2834 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002835 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002836 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2837 1, not 2.
2838
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002839- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2840 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2841 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2842 limit.
2843
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002844- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2845 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2846 bug #623464.
2847
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002848- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2849 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2850 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2851 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2852
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002856- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2857
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002858- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2859 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2860 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2861 with Python 2.3a2.
2862
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002863- os.path exposes getctime.
2864
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002865- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002866 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002867 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002868 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002869 unit tests of floating point results.
2870
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002871- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2872 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2873 has been increased.
2874
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002875- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2876 executed.
2877
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002878- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2879 postinstallation script.
2880
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002881- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2882 test the current module.
2883
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002884- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002885 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2886 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2887 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2888 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2889
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002890- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002891 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002892 Ward's Optik package.
2893
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002894- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2895 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2896 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2897 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2898
2899- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2900 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002901 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002902
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002903- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2904 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2905 shelf are binary pickles.
2906
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002907- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2908 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2909
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002910- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2911 modules are iterators now.
2912
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002913- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2914 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2915 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2916 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2917 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2918 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002919
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002920- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2921 with their entity value.
2922
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002923- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2924
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002925- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2926 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002927
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002928- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2929 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002930 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002931
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002932- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2933 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2934 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2935 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2936 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2937 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2938 main():
2939
2940 import locale
2941 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2942
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002943- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2944 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2945
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002946- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2947 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2948 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2949 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2950 to the new standard.
2951
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002952- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2953 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2954 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2955 an extension to the database.
2956
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002957- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2958 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2959 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2960 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002961 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002962
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002963- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002964 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002965
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002966- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2967 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2968 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2969 bounded integers.
2970
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002971- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2972 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2973 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2974 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2975 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2976 in existence.
2977
2978 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2979 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2980 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2981 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2982 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2983 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2984
2985 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2986 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2987 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2988 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2989
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002990- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2991 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2992 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2993
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002994- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2995
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002996- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2997 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2998 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2999 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3000
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003001- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3002 argument.
3003
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003004- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3005 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3006 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3007 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3008 [SF patch 560794].
3009
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003010- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3011 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3012 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003013 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3014 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3015 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003016
3017- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3018 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003019
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003020- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3021 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3022 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3023 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003024
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003025- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3026 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3027 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3028 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3029 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3030
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003031- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003032
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003033- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3034
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003035- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3036 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3037 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3038 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3039 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3040 identical to None.
3041
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003042- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3043 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3044 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3045 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3046 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3047 results now.
3048
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003049- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3050 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3051
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003052- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3053 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3054 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3055 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3056 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3057 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3058 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3059 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3060
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003061- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3062
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003063- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3064 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3065
3066- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3067 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3068 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3069 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3070 and other systems.
3071
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003072- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3073 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3074 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3075 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 +00003076 work well with these.
3077
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003078- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3079
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003080- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003081 connections.
3082
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003083- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3084 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3085 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3086
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003087- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3088 sets
3089
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003090- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3091 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3092 name.
3093
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003094- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3095 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3096 passed in.
3097
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003098- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003099 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003100 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3101 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003102
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003103- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3104
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003105- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3106
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003107- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3108 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3109 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3110
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003111- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3112 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3113 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3114 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003115 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003116
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003117- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003118 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003119 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003120
3121- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3122 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3123 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3124
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003125- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003126 the value of its expression argument.
3127
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003128- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3129 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3130 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3131
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003132- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3133 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3134 skipstone browser was included.
3135
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003136- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3137 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3138
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003139Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003141
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003142- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3143 names in addition to accepting file names.
3144
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003145- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3146 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3147 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3148 still used and useful.)
3149
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003150- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3151 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3152 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3153 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003154
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003155- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3156 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3157 the generated binary.
3158
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003159Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003161
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003162- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3163
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003164- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3165 except in the hands of experts.
3166
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003167- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003168 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3169 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3170 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003171
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003172- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3173 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3174 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3175 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3176 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3177 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3178 builds.
3179
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003180- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3181 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3182 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3183 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3184 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3185 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3186 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3187 new type.
3188
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003189- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003190
3191 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3192 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3193 positive infinities.
3194
3195 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3196 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3197 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3198 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3199 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3200 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3201 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3202
3203 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3204
3205 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3206
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003207- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3208 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3209 size of the executable.
3210
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003211- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3212 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3213 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3214 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003215
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003216- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3217
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003218- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3219 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3220 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003221
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003222- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3223 well as Unix.
3224
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003225- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3226 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3227 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3228 modules in the README file for details.
3229
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003230C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003232
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003233- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3234 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003235 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003236 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003237 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003238
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003239- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3240 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3241 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3242 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3243 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3244 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003245 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003246 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3247 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3248 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3249 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3250 aligned.)
3251
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003252- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3253 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3254 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3255
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003256- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3257 level.
3258
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003259- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3260 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3261 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3262 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3263 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3264
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003265- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3266 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3267 code.
3268
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003269- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3270 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3271 adjusting for negative indices.
3272
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003273- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3274 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3275 object.
3276
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003277- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3278 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3279 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3280
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003281- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3282 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003283
3284- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3285
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003286- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3287 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3288 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3289 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3290
3291- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3292
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003293- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003294
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003295- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003296 without going through the buffer API.
3297
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003299
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003300- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3301 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3302 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3303 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003305- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3306 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3307
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003308- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003309 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3310
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003311New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003313
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003314- OpenVMS is now supported.
3315
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003316- AtheOS is now supported.
3317
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003318- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3319
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003320- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3321
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003322Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-----
3324
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003325- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3326 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3327 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003328
3329Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003331
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003332- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3333 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3334 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3335 bugs.
3336 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003337 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003338 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3339 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003340 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003341
3342- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003343 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003344
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003345- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3346 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3347
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003348- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3349 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003350 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003351 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3352
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003353- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3354 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3355 use files" uninstall option).
3356
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003357- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3358
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003359- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3360 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3361
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003362- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3363 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3364 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3365
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003366- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3367 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3368 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3369 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3370 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003371 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3372 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3373 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003374
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003375- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003376 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003377 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3378 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3379 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3380 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3381 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3382 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3383 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3384 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3385 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3386 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3387 work around.
3388
3389- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3390 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3391 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3392 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3393 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3394 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3395 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3396 specified with O_CREAT too).
3397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003398Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399----
3400
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003401- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003402
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003403- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3404 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3405 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003407- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3408 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3409 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3410
3411- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3412 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3413 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3414 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3415 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3416 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3417 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3418 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003419
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003420- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3421 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3422 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003423
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003424- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3425 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3426 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3427 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3428 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003429
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003430- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3431 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3432 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003433
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003434- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3435 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003436
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003437- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3438 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3439 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3440 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3441 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003443- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3444 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3445 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3446
3447- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3448 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3449 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003450
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003451- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3452 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3453 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3454 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003455 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003456
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003457- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3458 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003459
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003460- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3461 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003462
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003463- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003464 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003465 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3466 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003467
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003468
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003469What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003470===============================
3471
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3473
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003474Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003476
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003477- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3478 with a custom metaclass.
3479
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003480Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003482
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003483- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3484 are proxies.
3485
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003488
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003489- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3490 very short strings.
3491
3492- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3493 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3494 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3495 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3496 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3497
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003498Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003500
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003501- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3502 close or delete time).
3503
3504- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3505 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3506
3507- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3508
3509- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003510 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003511
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003512Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003514
3515Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003517
3518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003520
3521New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003523
3524Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003526
3527Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003529
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003530- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3531
3532- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3533 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3534
3535- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3536 deleted at process exit time.
3537
3538- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3539 in backslash.
3540
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003541Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003543
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003544- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3545 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3546 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3547
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003548
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003549What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003550===========================
3551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3553
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003554Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003556
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003557- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3558 been extensively updated. See
3559
3560 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3561
3562 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3563
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003564- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3565 deleted!
3566
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003567- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3568 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3569 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3570 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3571 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3572
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003573- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3574
3575 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3576 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3577
3578 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3579 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3580 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3581 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3582 supported anyway.
3583
3584 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3585 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3586
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003587- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3588 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3589 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3590 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3591 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003592
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003593- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3594 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3595 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3596
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003597Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003599
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003600- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3601 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3602 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3603 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3604 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3605 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003606 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3607 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3608 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3609 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003610
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003611- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3612 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3613 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3614
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003617
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003618- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3619
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003620Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003622
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003623- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3624 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3625 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3626 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3627 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3628 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3629
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003630- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3631
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003632- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3633
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003634- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3635
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003636- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3637 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3638 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3639
3640- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3641
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003642Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003644
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003645- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3646 off a search on Google.
3647
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003650
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003651- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3652 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3653 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3654 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3655 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3656 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3657 other platforms should do likewise.
3658
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003659- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3660 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3661 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3662
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003663C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003665
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003666- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3667 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3668 producing key-value pairs.
3669
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003670- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003671 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003672 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3673 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3674 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3675 previously went unchallenged.
3676
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003677New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003679
3680Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003682
3683Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003685
3686Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003688
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003689- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3690 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003691
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003692- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3693 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3694 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3695 home.
3696
3697
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003698What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003699===========================
3700
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3702
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003703Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003705
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003706- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3707 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003708
3709 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003710 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003711
3712 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3713 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003714 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003715 This needs to be documented.
3716
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003717- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3718 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3719
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003720- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3721 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3722 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3723
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003724- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3725 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3726
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003727- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3728 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3729 class forbids it).
3730
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003731- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3732 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3733 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3734
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003735- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3736
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003737Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003738-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003739
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003740- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3741 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003742 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003743
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003744- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3745 (like 1 + '').
3746
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003749
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003750- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3751 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3752 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3753 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003754 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003755 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3756
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003757- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3758 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3759 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3760 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3761
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003762- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3763 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003764 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3765 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3766 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003767
3768- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3769 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003770
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003771- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3772 bytes on its input.
3773
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003774Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003776
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003777- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003778 convenience function.
3779
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003780- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3781 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3782 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003783 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3784 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3785 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3786 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3787 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3788 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003789
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003790- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3791 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3792 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3793 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3794
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003795- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3796 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3797 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3798
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003799- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3800 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3801 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3802 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3803
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003804- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3805 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003807 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3808 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3809 new -l and -e options.
3810
3811- statcache is now deprecated.
3812
3813- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3814 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003816 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3817 time properly taken into account.
3818
3819- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3820 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3821 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3822 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3823
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003824Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003826
3827Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003829
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003830- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3831 is built with libdb3 if available.
3832
3833- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003835C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003837
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003838- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3839 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3840 PySequence_Size().
3841
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003842- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3843
3844- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3845 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3846 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3847
3848- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3849 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3850
3851- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3852 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3853
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003854New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003856
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003857- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3858 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3859
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003860- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3861 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3862
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003863- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3864
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003865Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003867
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003868- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3869 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3870
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003873
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003874Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003876
3877- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3878 removed completely in the next release.
3879
3880- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3881 OSX.
3882
3883- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3884 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3885
3886- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3887
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003888
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003889What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003890===========================
3891
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3893
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003894Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003896
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003897- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003898 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003899 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003900 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3901 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003902 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3903 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003904 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3905 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003906
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003907- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3908 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3909
3910- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3911 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3912
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003913Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003915
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003916- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3917 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3918 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3919 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3920 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3921 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3922 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3923 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3924
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003925- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3926 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3927 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3928 example).
3929
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003930- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003931 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003932 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003933 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003934
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003935- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3936 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3937 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003938 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003939
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003940- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3941 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3942 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3943 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3944 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3945 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3946
3947 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3948
3949 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3950
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003951Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003953
3954- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3955
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003956- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3957
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003958- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3959 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003960
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003961- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3962 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3963 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3964 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3965 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3966 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003967 attributes.
3968
3969- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3970 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3971 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003972
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003973- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3974 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3975 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003976
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003977- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3978 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3979 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003980 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3981 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3982
3983- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3984 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003985
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003986Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003988
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003989- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3990 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3991
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003992- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3993 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3994 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3995 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3996
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003997- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3998 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3999 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4000 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4001
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004002 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4003 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4004 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4005 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4006 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4007 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4008 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4009 without losing information).
4010
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004011- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004012 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4013 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4014 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4015 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4016 module).
4017
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004018 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004019 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4020 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4021 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4022 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004023
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004024- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004025 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4026 encoding.
4027
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004028- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4029 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4030
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004032 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4033
4034- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4035 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4036 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4037 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4038
4039- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4040
4041- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4042 ON, and OFF.
4043
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004044- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4045 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4046
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004047Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004049
4050- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4051 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4052 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004053
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004054- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4055 been added: -X and -E.
4056
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004057Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004059
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004060- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4061 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4062
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004065
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004066- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4067 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4068 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4069 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4070 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4071
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004072- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4073 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4074 as long) arguments.
4075
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004076- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4077 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4078 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4079 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4080 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4081 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4082
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004083- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4084 input.
4085
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004086New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004088
4089Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004091
4092Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004094
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004095- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4096 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4097 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4098
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004099- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4100 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4101 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004102 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004103
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4105 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4106 import signal
4107 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004108
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004110 while 1:
4111 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004113 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4114 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4115 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4116 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004117
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004118
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004119What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4120===========================
4121
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4123
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004124Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004126
4127- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4128 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4129 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4130
4131- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4132 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4133 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4134 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4135 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4136 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4137 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004138
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004139- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004140 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004141 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4142 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4143 associate a docstring with a property.
4144
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004145- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4146 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4147 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4148 other built-in object types.
4149
4150- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4151 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4152 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4153 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4154 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4155
4156- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4157 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4158
4159- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4160 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004161 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004162 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4163 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4164 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4165 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4166 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4167
4168- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4169 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4170 class.
4171
4172- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4173 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4174 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4175 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4176
4177- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4178 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4179 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4180 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4181
4182- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4183 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4184
4185- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4186 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4187 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4188 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4189 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004190 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004191 with the same value as s.
4192
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004193- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4194
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004195Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004197
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004198- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4199
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004200- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4201 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4202 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4203 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4204 objects.
4205
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004206- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4207 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004208 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4209 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4210
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004211- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4212 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4213 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4214
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004215Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004217
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004218- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4219 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4220 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4221 by the instances.
4222
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004223- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4224 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4225 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4226
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004227- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4228 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4229 before the entire comparison is complete.
4230
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004231- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4232 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4233 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4234
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004235- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4236 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4237 getwriter().
4238
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004239- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4240 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4241
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004242- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004243 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4244 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4245
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004246- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4247 iterable object.
4248
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004249- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4250 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004252- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4253 authentication.
4254
4255- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4256 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004257
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004258- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004259 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4260 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4261 a sample driver.)
4262
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004263Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004265
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004266- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4267 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4268 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4269 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4270 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4271 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4272 kernel has large file support.
4273
4274- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4275 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4276 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4277 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4278 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4279
4280- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4281 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4282 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4283
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004284C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004286
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004287- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4288 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004290New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004292
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004293- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4294 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4295
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004296Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004298
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004299- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4300 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4301 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4302 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4303 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4304
4305- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4306 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4307 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4308 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4309
4310- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4311 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4312
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004313Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004315
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004316- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004317 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4318 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004319
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004320
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004321What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4322===========================
4323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4325
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004326Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004328
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004329- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4330 big to represent as a C double.
4331
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004332- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4333 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4334 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4335 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4336 restriction).
4337
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004338- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4339 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4340 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4341 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4342 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4343
4344 >>> dir([])
4345 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4346 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4347 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4348 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4349 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4350 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4351 'reverse', 'sort']
4352
4353 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4354
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004355- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004356 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4357 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4358 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4359 OverflowError exception.
4360
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004361- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004362 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004363 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4364 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4365 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4366 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4367 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004368 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4370 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4371
4372 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4373 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4374 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4375 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004376
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004377- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004378 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4379 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4380 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4381 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4382 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4383 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4384 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4385 once it is created.
4386
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004387- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4388 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4389 (key, value) pairs.
4390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004391- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004392 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4393 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4394
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004395- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4396 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4397 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4398 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4399 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004400
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004401- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004402 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4403 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4404
4405 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4406
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004407- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004408 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4409
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004410Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004412
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004413- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004414 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4415 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004416
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004417- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4418 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4419 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4420 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4421 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4422 in this area anymore).
4423
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004424- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4425 threading.Timer.
4426
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004427- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4428 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4429
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004430- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004431 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4432
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004433- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004434 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4435 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4436 converted to Python longs.
4437
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004438- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004439 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4440
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004441- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4442 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4443 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4444
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004445Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004447
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004448- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4449 division operators as per PEP 238.
4450
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004451Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004453
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004454- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4455 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4456 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4457 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4458
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004459C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004461
4462- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004463
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004464- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4465 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004466 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4469 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004470 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004473- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004474 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4475 module:
4476
4477 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004478
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004479 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4480 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004481
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004482 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4483 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004484
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004485 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4486
4487 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004489- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004490 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4491 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4492 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004493
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004494New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004496
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004497- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4498 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4499 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4500 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4501 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004502
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004503Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004505
4506Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004508
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004509- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4510 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4511 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4512 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004513 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4514 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4515 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4516 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4517 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004518
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004519- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004520 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4521
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004522
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004523What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4524===========================
4525
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4527
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004528Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004530
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004531- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4532 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4533
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004534- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4535 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4536 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004537
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004538- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4539 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4540 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4541 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004542
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004543- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4544
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004546
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004547Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004549
4550- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004551 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004552 the module docstring for details.
4553
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004556
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004557- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004558 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4559 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4560 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004561
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004562- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4563 Nick Mathewson.
4564
4565Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004567
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004568- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4569 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4570 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4571 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4572 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4573 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4574 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4575 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4576
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004577- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4578 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4579 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4580 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4581
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004582- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4583 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4584 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4585 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4586 come a long way).
4587
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004588- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4589 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4590 write filters for these warnings).
4591
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004592- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4593 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4594 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4595 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4596 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4597
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004598- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4599 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4600 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4601 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4602 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4603 older distribution.
4604
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004607
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004608- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4609 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004610 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004611
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004612- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4613 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4614 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4615
4616- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4617
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004618- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4619
4620- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4621
4622- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004625
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004626- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4627
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004628New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004630
4631C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004633
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004634- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4635 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4636 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4637 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4638 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4639 against buffer overruns.
4640
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004641- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004642 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4643 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004644 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4645 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4646 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4647
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004648- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4649 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4650 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4651 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4652 deprecated.
4653
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004654Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004656
4657- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4658 relevant is found.
4659
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004660
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004661What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004662===========================
4663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4665
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004666Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004668
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004669- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4670 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4671 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4672 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4673 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4674 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4675 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4676 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004677 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004678 repaired.
4679
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004680- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004681 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004682 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4683 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4684 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4685 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4686 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4687 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4688 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4689 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4690
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004691- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4692 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4693 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4694 leading BMO character).
4695
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004696- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4697 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4698 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4699
4700 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4701 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4702 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004703
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004704 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4705 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4706 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4707 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4708 for various simple to use conversions.
4709
4710 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4711 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4712
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4714 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4715 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4716 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4717 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4718 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4719 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4720 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4721 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4722 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4723 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4724 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4725 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4726 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4727 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004728
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004729- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4730 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4731 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004732 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004733 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004734
4735 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004736 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4737 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4738 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4739 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4740 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004741 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4742 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004743
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004744 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4745 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4746 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004747 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004748
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004749- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4750 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4751 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4752 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4753 floating arithmetic,
4754
4755 x = 9007199254740992.0
4756 print long(x)
4757
4758 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4759 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4760 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4761 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4762 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4763 functions are of good quality).
4764
4765 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4766 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4767 algorithms to break.
4768
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004769- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4770 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4771 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4772 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4773 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4774 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4775 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4776 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4777 order.
4778
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004779- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4780 operation along the most common code paths.
4781
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004782- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4783 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4784
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004785- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4786 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4787 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4788 {}.update(UserDict())
4789
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004790- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4791 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4792 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4793 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4794 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4795 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4796 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4797 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4798
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004799- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004800 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004802 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004803 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4804 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004805 join() method of strings
4806 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004807 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4808 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004810 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004811
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004812- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4813 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4814
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004815- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4816 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4817
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004818- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4819 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4820 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4821 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4822
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004823- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4824 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004825 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004826 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4827 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004828
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004829- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4830
4831
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004832Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004834
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004835- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004836 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004837 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4838 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4839
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004840- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4841 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4842
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004843- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4844 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4845 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4846 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4847
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004848- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4849 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4850 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4851
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004852- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4853
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004854- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4855
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004856- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4857 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4858 that are still imported into string.py).
4859
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004860- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4861
4862- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4863 Now it does.
4864
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004865- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4866
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004867- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4868 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4869 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4870 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4871 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004872 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4873 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004874
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004875- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4876 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4877 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4878 'help(object)'.
4879
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004880Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004882
4883- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004884 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004885 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4886 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4887
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004888- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004889 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4890 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004891
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004892C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004893-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004894
4895- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4896 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897
4898----
4899
4900**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**